Information hiding based on search-order coding for VQ indices

Compared with various information-hiding techniques on the spatial domain proposed previously, VQ-based information hiding technique has not been paid much attention. As a result, we present a steganographic scheme based on the search-order coding (SOC) compression method of vector quantization (VQ) indices in this paper. The major goal is to embed secret data into the compression codes of the host image such that the interceptors will not notice the existence of secret data. In the proposed scheme, the embedding process induces no extra coding distortion and adjusts the bit rate according to the size of secret data. According to the experimental results, it is confirmed that the proposed scheme yields a good and acceptable compression ratio of the image. In addition, the receiver can efficiently receive both the compressed image and the embedded data almost at the same time. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.