Hiding Data in a cover image often applies a steganographic technique that makes the stego image appear as similar to the original cover image as possible. Conventional VQ-based (vector quantization) steganographic methods typically involve codeword replacements to hide secret bits. Such replacements may cause serious distortion or a perceptible block effect on the stego image. In this paper, we propose a three-phase steganographic method for the VQ index table. Instead of applying codeword replacements, the proposedmethod uses different coding schemes-SOC, SMVQ, and VQ-to imply the secret bits. The quality of the stego image generated by the proposed method is completely equal to that of the original cover image (i.e., the VQ cover image). Experimental results have shown that the proposed method has the best stego image quality compared with other methods. In addition, the proposed method provides adaptive embedding capacity and compression bit rate according to predefined thresholds.
