Lossless Data Embedding With High Embedding Capacity Based on Declustering for VQ-Compressed Codes

The purpose of data hiding with reversibility property is to recover the original cover media after extracting the hidden data from the stegomedia. In this paper, we propose a reversible data-hiding scheme for embedding secret data in VQ-compressed codes based on the declustering strategy and the similarity property of adjacent areas in a natural image. Two declustering methods are proposed using the minimum-spanning-tree and the short-spanning-path algorithms, respectively. The proposed data-hiding method can achieve the benefits including easy implementation, completely recovering the original compressed codes, and high efficiency of embedding and extraction processes. The experimental results also show that the proposed method has more flexible and higher embedding capacity than other schemes.