Reversible information hiding for VQ indices based on locally adaptive coding

Steganography is one of protective methods for secret communications over public networks such as the Internet. This paper proposes a novel reversible information hiding method for vector quantization (VQ) compressed images based on locally adaptive coding method. The proposed steganographic method embeds a secret message into VQ indices in an index table during the process of compressing the index table in the block-by-block manner. The experimental results show that, in average, the proposed method achieves the best visual quality of reconstructed images and the best embedding rate compared to two related works. In terms of compression rate and encoding execution time, in average, Yang et al.'s method is the best, followed by our proposed method, and then Lin and Chang's method.