A reversible data embedding scheme based on search order coding for VQ index tables

This paper proposes a reversible data hiding scheme for vector quantization (VQ)-compressed images based on search order coding (SOC). Data is embedded by choosing one of the possible ways to represent each embeddable index and outputted code is legitimate SOC code. The proposed scheme has two advantages. First it is more secure, comparing with previous SOC based schemes that generate non-legitimate codes as output. Second it can be used beside other schemes to embed more data and also it is a solution for the problem of transmission of side information of schemes which their outputs are legitimate VQ codes.