Improved Dynamic Embedding Scheme with Adaptive Pixel Replacement

The field of information security has gradually been valued in recent years; steganography and cryptography techniques are two popular methods for protecting data privacy. The image has spatial redundancy that is the neighboring pixels in the picture usually have similar intensity. Even the vector quantization-compressed (VQ) image after VQ encoding also has coding redundancy, so there is also a correlation between the index values. Based on coding redundancy, we proposed a high-capacity IDES-APR scheme for protecting confidential data. We develop a reduced index strategy to recode the VQ index, by searching for similar index values; the original redundant code is reduced to only three bits. Adjust the VQ image by embedding secret data to create stego image block, which become more similar to the original image blocks after embedding. Compared with other similar work, the proposed scheme preforms better regarding the embedding capacity and image quality.