Vector quantization (VQ) is a widely used technique for many applications especially for lossy image compression. Since VQ significantly reduces the size of a digital image, it can save the costs of storage space and image delivery. Search-order coding (SOC) was proposed for improving the performance of VQ in terms of compression rate. However, SOC requires extra data (i.e. indicators) to indicate source of codewords so the compression rate may be affected. To overcome such a drawback, in this paper, a search-order coding with the indicator-elimination property was proposed by using a technique of reversible data hiding. The proposed method is the first one using such a concept of data hiding to achieve a better compression rate of SOC. From experimental results, the performance of the SOC method can be successfully improved by the proposed indicator eliminated search-order coding method in terms of compression rate. In addition, compared with other relevant schemes, the proposed method is also more flexible than some existing schemes.
