A VQ-based image-in-image data hiding scheme

Vector quantization (VQ)-based data hiding and watermarking techniques form a newly developed branch in the digital watermarking research field. We propose a novel watermarking scheme for image-in-image data hiding based on VQ. Unlike existing schemes in the literature for embedding a binary watermark into the original image with VQ, we present an efficient and secure algorithm for embedding a gray-level watermark into the original. The offered scheme is robust to attacks such as VQ compression and JPEG compression. Moreover, it greatly expands the capacity of the watermarking system. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme in watermark robustness and watermark capacity. The results also prove the effectiveness of our proposed schemes in VQ-based image-in-image data hiding.