A Best-pair-first Capacity-distortion Control for Data Hiding on VQ Compression Domain

Traditional data hiding researches are largely concentrated on the total hiding capacity versus the quality of the resulting stego-image. The aim of which is to achieve higher total hiding capacity while maintaining a less distorted stego-image. This paper is concentrated largely on the capacity-distortion control for data hiding on the VQ compressed domain. The main purpose is to achieve higher quality stego-images for known (predefined) hiding capacities. Data will be hidden starting from the best hiding locations until all data are hidden. The proposed approach is called the best-pair-first strategy and can achieve a higher capacity-distortion control ability (in terms of stego-image´s PSNR value). Experimental results showed that the proposed approach achieves higher PSNRs for any hiding capacity (within the VQ-domain´s hiding capacity boundary) in comparison to the traditional data hiding method on the VQ compressed domain.