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A low distortion reversible data hiding scheme for search order coding of VQ indices

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Abstract

In recent years many reversible data hiding schemes for vector quantization (VQ)-compressed images have been developed. However most of them generate non-legitimate codes as output and make the data hiding behavior detectable. Moreover existing schemes with legitimate outputs usually need side information to achieve reversibility. In this paper a reversible data hiding scheme for VQ-compressed images based on search order coding (SOC) is proposed which generate legitimate SOC codes as output. For each index of the input VQ index table which finds a match in its corresponding SOC path, the indices located in the SOC path are clustered, and then SOC codes of some blocks are changed to SOC code of one of the indices in the same cluster to hide data. Some SOC codes are re-encoded using original index value (OIV) codes for recovery purpose. By the strategy of re-encoding, the proposed scheme doesn’t need any side information. The proposed scheme adaptively adjusts the criteria of exchangeability of the indices based on the smoothness level of each image block to prevent appearing spots in the stego-image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme on average could embed about 0.5 bits per index by only about 0.67 dB degradation of image quality for a set of test images includes smooth an complicated images. Also superiority of the proposed scheme when compared with the previous schemes is confirmed from various aspects; hiding capacity, stego-image quality, the average of the bit rate of the output code, and the execution time.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would say thanks to Dr. Reza Akbari for his help in paper presentation. They also would say thanks to Ms. Maryam Khalilzadeh for her support.

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Correspondence to Peyman Rahmani.

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Rahmani, P., Dastghaibyfard, G. A low distortion reversible data hiding scheme for search order coding of VQ indices. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 10713–10734 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2200-2

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