Multiple Bits Embedding Approach for the Hit-pattern-based VQ Reversible Steganography

Data hiding is a technique which embeds secret data into cover media. It is important to the multimedia security and has been widely studied. Recently, some researchers paid attention to reversible data hiding methods. These methods can reconstruct the original image from the stego-image when embedded data are extracted. In this paper, we extend the hit-pattern-based reversible steganographic method for vector quantization (VQ) compressed images. A block is embedded with 2-bit secret data, which efficiently enlarges the embedding capacity. Also, threshold-bounded hit patterns efficiently keep the embedded results with high PSNR values. Compared to Chang et al.’s method and Yang et al.’s method, the experimental results show that the proposed method has both higher capacities and better PSNR values.