Data hiding using trellis coded quantization

Information theoretic tools lead to the design and analysis of new blind data hiding methods. A novel quantization-based blind method, which uses trellis coded quantization, is proposed in this manuscript. The redundancy in initial state selection during trellis coded quantization is exploited to hide information as the index of this initial state. This index is recovered at the receiver by Viterbi decoding after comparison with all initial states. The performance of the proposed method is compared against other well-known approaches via simulations and promising results are obtained. Based on these results, the proposed method can be preferred in certain applications with high distortion attacks.