Image steganographic scheme using predictive side match vector quantisation

Abstract

Information hiding or steganography involves embedding significant data into various forms of digital media such as text, audio, image and video secretly. With the rapid development of network technology, information hiding techniques have been widely applied in copyright protection, fingerprinting and secret communication. In this paper, an image steganographic scheme capable of hiding considerable quantities of secret data while preserving acceptable visual quality for cover images is proposed. The proposed scheme is applied on the compressed domain of image. The major idea of this scheme is to hide secret data into the compressed codes of cover image during the encoding process of side match vector quantisation (SMVQ) such that the interceptors will not capture the secret data. The proposed steganographic scheme takes advantages of the prediction property of SMVQ state codebook. In addition, it adaptively adjusts the hiding procedure according to the local feature within the cover image. According to the computer simulation, it is confirmed that the hiding capacity for secret data and the visual quality of the cover images obtained by the proposed scheme is much better than the earlier works. Moreover, the receiver can efficiently receive both the compressed cover image and the hidden secret data simultaneously.