A Novel High Capacity Reversible Information Hiding Scheme Based on Side-Match Prediction and Shortest Spanning Path

Abstract

In recent years, information hiding techniques have attracted increased attention owing to the growing demand for the ability to exchange large amounts of information. In addition, hiding information in compressed messages is very practical in improving transmission efficiency and saving large amounts of storage space. However, the damage caused by hiding data in compressed messages reduces image quality more than the damage caused by hiding data in uncompressed messages. Hence, this paper proposes a data hiding scheme based on side-match prediction and declustering techniques for vector quantization (VQ) compressed images. The appropriate side-match prediction not only embeds secret information into the VQ index but also reverses the original compressed index. In addition, the capacity for secret information can be varied adaptively depending on the requirements of different applications. As experimental results indicate, the proposed scheme indeed outperforms previous work in hiding capacity and in the image quality of stego-images.