Adaptive Hiding Scheme Based on VQ-Indices Using Commutable Codewords

Hiding secret message in an image has received significant attention that it will not arise attackers’ suspicion. Recently, VQ-based compression domain is frequently employed. Although some hiding schemes are VQ-based compression domain, their hiding capacities are limited. To increase the hiding capacity, this paper applies codewords grouping concept to design an adaptive capacity hiding scheme. Based on our scheme, more bits can be embedded into single VQ index only if its degradation caused by replacing other codeword is less than the predefined threshold. The advantages of this proposed scheme are the higher capacity exploration on secret embedding, and acceptable stability on the display of stego-images.