A reversible data hiding scheme for the encoded vector quantization (VQ) index table with the improved searching order coding (ISOC) is proposed.
Original image is first compressed through a sorted VQ codebook.
All indices are categorized into three types, i.e., SOC type, relative addressing (RA) type and VQ type, based on the relationship between the index and its neighboring indices.
Each of the SOC and RA types of indices is used to embed 1-bit secret data.
The hiding capacity of the proposed scheme is higher than the comparative scheme.