earticle

영어

In this paper, we propose an image watermarking technique that effectively hides confidential data in the LSB of image pixels by utilizing the characteristics of the image. In the proposed technique, the image is precisely divided into boundary surface and normal region other than the boundary surface and performs different processing. The boundary surface existing in the image is created by meeting different regions and contains important information of the image. One bit of confidential data is concealed in the LSB of the pixel at the boundary surface to preserve the characteristics of the boundary surface. In normal region other than the boundary surface, the pixel values are similar, and the change with the adjacent pixel values is smooth. Based on this property, even if the 2 bits of confidential data are hidden in the lower 2 bits of the pixel in the normal region, the difference cannot be visually distinguished. When confidential data is concealed in an image as described above, the amount of confidential data concealed in an image can be increased while maintaining excellent image quality. Concealing confidential data by applying the proposed method increases the amount of confidential data concealed by up to 84.6% compared to the existing method. The proposed technique can be effectively used for commercial image watermarking that hides copyright information.