In this paper, we propose a novel reversible data hiding scheme in the index tables of the vector quantization (VQ) compressed images based on index set construction strategy. On the sender side, three index sets are constructed, in which the first set and the second set include the indices with greater and less occurrence numbers in the given VQ index table, respectively. The index values in the index table belonging to the second set are added with prefixes from the third set to eliminate the collision with the two derived mapping sets of the first set, and this operation of adding prefixes has data hiding capability additionally. The main data embedding procedure can be achieved easily by mapping the index values in the first set to the corresponding values in the two derived mapping sets. The same three index sets reconstructed on the receiver side ensure the correctness of secret data extraction and the lossless recovery of index table. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.