Lattices have been conceived as a powerful tool for data hiding. While conventional studies and applications focus on achieving the optimal robustness versus distortion tradeoff, in some applications such as data hiding in medical/physiological signals, the primary concern is to achieve a minimum amount of distortion to the cover signal. In this paper, we revisit the celebrated quantization index modulation (QIM) scheme and propose a minimum-distortion version of it, referred to as MD-QIM. The crux of MD-QIM is to move the data point to only the boundary of the Voronoi region of the lattice point indexed by a message, which suffices for subsequent correct decoding. At any fixed code rate, the scheme achieves the minimum amount of distortion by sacrificing the robustness to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) attacks. Simulation results confirm that our scheme significantly outperforms QIM in terms of mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and percentage residual difference (PRD).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.