Nowadays, we greatly depend on Internet mass transmission, of all kinds of data, including critical information among them. Therefore, secure communication is an important topic. Data hiding can embed critical information into carriers, such as images, videos, and so on. Efficiently embedding information into images is the goal of this research. Image steganography techniques utilise a cover image to hide secret data and produce a stego-image by modifying pixel values. After modification, the stego-image is distorted with respect to the cover image. Vector quantisation (VQ) is a lossy image compression technique. The image recovered from the VQ compressed code has distortion compared to the original image. Based on the VQ image, we can hide secret data by modifying the pixel value in a way that the distortion is compensated. The embedding rate of the proposed scheme is adjustable. Experimental results show that our scheme can achieve a high embedding rate in comparison with related works. For low-quality VQ images, embedding can improve the visual quality of the stego-image at the same time.

如今，我们极大地依赖互联网大量传输各种数据，包括其中的关键信息。因此，安全通信是一个重要的话题。数据隐藏可以将关键信息嵌入到载体中，例如图像、视频等。将信息有效地嵌入图像是本研究的目标。图像隐写技术利用覆盖图像来隐藏秘密数据并通过修改像素值来生成隐写图像。修改后，隐写图像相对于封面图像失真。矢量量化 (VQ) 是一种有损图像压缩技术。从 VQ 压缩代码恢复的图像与原始图像相比有失真。基于 VQ 图像，我们可以通过修改像素值以补偿失真的方式隐藏秘密数据。所提出方案的嵌入率是可调的。实验结果表明，与相关工作相比，我们的方案可以实现较高的嵌入率。对于低质量的 VQ 图像，嵌入可以同时提高隐写图像的视觉质量。