A Steganographic Method for Hiding Secret Data Using Side Match Vector Quantization

To increase the number of the embedded secrets and to improve the quality of the stego-image in the vector quantization (VQ)-based information hiding scheme, in this paper, we present a novel information-hiding scheme to embed secrets into the side match vector quantization (SMVQ) compressed code. First, a host image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. For these seed blocks of the image, VQ is adopted without hiding secrets. Then, for each of the residual blocks, SMVQ or VQ is employed according to the smoothness of the block such that the proper codeword is chosen from the state codebook or the original codebook to compress it. Finally, these compressed codes represent not only the host image but also the secret data. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than other VQ-based information hiding scheme in terms of the embedding capacity and the image quality. Moreover, in the proposed scheme, the compression rate is better than the compared scheme.