Generalized Trellis Coded Quantization for Data Hiding

Information theory guides us to investigate the choice of quantizers for data hiding applications. In this paper, the design of the quantizer selection rule in trellis coded quantization (TCQ) based data hiding is discussed. A novel trellis branch quantizer selection rule which changes the old state transition function and takes advantage of all trellis states is proposed so as to increase robustness against attacks. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the new TCQ path selection (or branch selection) method achieves better bit error rate (BER) performance in the case of Gaussian attack compared to other popular approaches. The path selection rule could also be used as a secret key to provide security for the practical data hiding.