Image refining technique using digital watermarking

Abstract

An image refining technique is proposed. The digital watermarking and Reed-Solomon (RS) coding techniques are adopted to provide the image refining. The RS codewords' parities of original image are used as a watermark to be embedded in the original image. The watermark can provide the error correction and detection capability for the original image (refining function). Meanwhile, we take the advantage of the parity bits of the rearranged DCT coefficients in the lower frequency subbands of the quantized DCT block to provide the robustness and imperceptibility requirement for watermarking technique. The proposed method can directly extract the embedded watermark from the watermarked image without using the original image, so it is feasible to implement it in a real time system. The experimental results show that the error correction and detection capability, imperceptibility, and robustness of the watermarking technique can be guaranteed.