A Location Map Free Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for VQ-Compressed Images Based on Search Order Coding

Most VQ based reversible data hiding schemes in the literature generate non-legitimate codes as output. Therefore such schemes are not suitable for some applications. In this paper a reversible data hiding scheme for VQ-compressed images based on search order coding (SOC) is proposed. The output of the proposed scheme is legitimate SOC code. Moreover the proposed scheme doesn´t need any side information to achieve reversibility and also flexibility adjusts hiding capacity and stego image quality. Experimental results show feasibility and superiority of the proposed scheme when compared with the current scheme.