Abstract
During transmission of digital images, secret messages can be embedded using data hiding techniques. Such techniques can transfer private secrets without drawing the attention of eavesdroppers. To reduce the amount of transmitted data, image compression methods are widely applied. Hiding secret data in compressed images is a hot issue recently. In this paper, we apply the de-clustering concept and the indicator-free search-order coding (IFSOC) technique to hide information into vector quantization (VQ) compressed images. Experimental results show that the proposed two-layer reversible data hiding scheme for IFSOC-encoded VQ index table can hide a large amount of secret data among state-of-the-art methods with a relatively lower bit rate and high security.
Highlights
A method that can perfectly recover a carrier is classified as a reversible data hiding (RDH) method [5,6,7,8]; otherwise, it is irreversible [9,10,11,12]
We focus on the data embedding of vector quantization (VQ) compressed images
In 2016, Qin and Hu proposed a data hiding scheme [23] based on the improved search-order coded (ISOC) VQ indices
Summary
In the era of fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, information security draws much more attention than ever and various data hiding schemes and secure communication techniques have been proposed [1,2,3,4]. In the original version of SOC data hiding, to switch an uncompressible code into a camouflaged compressed code, a reserved code is applied followed by the original index. In 2016, Qin and Hu proposed a data hiding scheme [23] based on the improved search-order coded (ISOC) VQ indices. The compression ability and the embedding capacity can be further improved These studies make different tradeoffs between embedding rate and file expansion based on the same scheme of indicator bit replacement. RDH for VQ index table based on different kinds of compression methods for VQ have been proposed [24,25,26,27]. We incorporate the de-clustering technique with an SOC-based method to improve data hiding capacity and information security.
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