• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.457-476
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• 2011

This paper presents an improved XOR-based Data Hiding Scheme (XDHS) to hide a halftone image in more than two halftone stego images. The hamming weight and hamming distance is a very important parameter affecting the quality of a halftone image. For this reason, we proposed a method that involves minimizing the hamming weights and hamming distances between the stego image and cover image in $2{\times}2$-pixel grids. Moreover, our XDHS adopts a block-wise operation to improve the quality of a halftone image and stego images. Furthermore, our scheme improves security by using a block-wise operation with A-patterns and B-patterns. Our XDHS method achieves a high quality with good security compared to the prior arts. An experiment verified the superiority of our XDHS compared with previous methods.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.656-664
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• 2006

In this paper, we introduce a new LUT based watermarking method for a halftone image. Watermark bits are hidden at pseudo-random locations of halftone image in the proposed method. The pixel values of the halftone image are determined from the LUT entry indexed by both the neighborhood halftone pixels and current grayscale value. The LUT is trained by a set of grayscale images and corresponding halftone images. Advantage of the LUT method is that it can be executed very fast compared with other watermarking methods for a halftone image. Therefore, the algorithm can be embedded in a printer. Experiments for real scanned images showed that the method is a feasible method to hide the large amount of data within a halftone image without noticeable distortion and comparing to the DHED method, is almost same in quality but significantly shorten in processing time.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.37-43
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• 2009

In this paper, we proposed that a novel method base on a binary image that technique is proposed for data hiding into binary images and halftone image. A binary image is bitmap image and halftone is composed by two-tone value in a limited region in an image. For this reason, it is not easy to hide messages in binary images. PWLC is a new method to hide a message in binary images. However, it yields images of unacceptable quality, unless you should change very few of it. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, we used run-length method into binary images. That is, we find a proper region to hide messages. In this paper, we proposed new method to hide messages in binary images. In addition, we proved that our algorithm is better than PWLC through the experiment.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.327-339
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new watermark algorithm for halftone images using iterative error minimizing method. In the proposed method, watermark bits are hidden at pseudo-random locations within a halftone image. To remove the distortions due to the inserted watermark bits and increase the invisibility of watermark, an iterative error minimizing technique is used. We define the halftoning error is defined as the difference between the original grayscale image and HVS-filtered printed halftone image. Then we iteratively find the pixel pattern with minimum halftoning error and displace the original pixel pattern with it. In order to be robust to geometrical modification like cropping or rotation, we insert the same watermark periodically into halftone images. Experiments using printed and scanned images show that the proposed method is a robust method to the geometrical modification and to hide the large amount of data within a halftone image without noticeable distortion.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.116-129
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• 2001

To improve the performance of the inverse halftoning, smoothing masks should be designed optimally by using the accurate information of halftone cells. In this thesis, the method of energy minimization is so defined as to determine the exact information of halftone cell. A heuristic search method is proposed to obtain efficiently the parameters of halftone cells which determine the minimum energy. A halftone-peak modeling method with several functions is proposed and used to get initial values of the parameters. The dimension decomposition technique is also adopted to speed up the search process of energy minimization. Several experiments show that the proposed method extracts correct location of the seed pixel of the halftone cell and the extracted information of the halftone cell can be used to get more exactly smoothed color images. The proposed method can be applied to extract the texture patterns, to separate channel images of a scanned color halftone image, and to extract the moire area in an image.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.405-424
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• 2013

In publishing applications, it is advantageous to embed data in halftone images. The CPT scheme (Chen-Pan-Tseng, 2000) is a steganographic data hiding scheme that was proposed for binary images, e.g., facsimiles. The CPT scheme uses a secret key and weight matrix to protect the hidden data and can hide as many as $r={\lfloor}{\log}_2(m{\times}n+1){\rfloor}$ bits of data in the image by changing at most 2 bits in the image. Our proposed scheme also uses a secret key to protect it from being compromised and a weight matrix to increase the data hiding rate. Our scheme improves the performance of the CPT scheme by using the simple principle of splitting each block into two parts. Our proposed scheme is called improved CPT (ICPT) and has a very high embedding capacity compared to previous schemes. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme generally has higher performance than previous schemes.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.183-193
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• 1998

Color inverse halftoning is the transformation of a color-halftone image to a continuous-tone color image that is more natural in human vision. In this paper, we propose a new smoothing mask that can remove halftone patterns in channel effectively and we apply it to color inverse halftoning. The proposed smoothing mask can make channel images more smooth and natural in human vision than traditional ones. Its characteristic can be adapted automatically according to the various color halftone images. We analyze the result images in various aspects through experiments. Experimental results show that the mask is useful for color inverse halftoning. It can be applied to field of multimedia application, such as desktop publishing, color facsimile and digital library construction.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.27 no.6A
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• pp.575-583
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• 2002

JBIG2 is an International Standard fur compression of Bi-level images and documents. JBIG2 supports three encoding modes for high compression according to region features of documents. One of which is generic region coding for bitmap coding. The basic bitmap coder is either MMR or arithmetic coding. Pattern matching coding method is used for text region, and halftone pattern coding is used for halftone region. In this paper, a document is segmented into line-art, halftone and text region for JBIG2 encoding and JBIG2 CODEC is implemented. For efficient region segmentation of documents, region segmentation method using wavelet coefficient is applied with existing boundary extraction technique. In case of facsimile test image(IEEE-167a), there is improvement in compression ratio of about 2% and enhancement of subjective quality. Also, we propose arbitrary shape halftone region coding, which improves subjective quality in talc neighboring text of halftone region.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.313-321
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• 2005

Digital halftoning is a process to produce a binary image so that the original image and its binary counterpart appear similar when observed from a distance. Among digital halftoning methods, error diffusion is a procedure for generating high quality bilevel images from continuous-tone images but blurs the edge information in the bilevel images. To solve this problem, we propose the improved error diffusion using local spatial information of the original images. Based on the fact that the human vision perceives not a pixel but local mean of input image, we compute edge enhancement information(EEI) by appling the ratio of a pixel and its adjacent pixels to local mean. The weights applied to local means is computed using the ratio of local activity measure(LAM) to the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. LAM is the measure of luminance changes in local regions and is obtained by adding the square of the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. We add the value to a input pixel of quantizer to enhance edge. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional methods by measuring the edge correlation. The halftone images by using the proposed method show better quality due to the enhanced edge. And the detailed edge is preserved in the halftone images by using the proposed method. Also the proposed method improves the quality of halftone images because unpleasant patterns for human visual system are reduced.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.221-228
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• 2005

The paper proposes the improved error diffusion halftoning system to enhance the edges using the spatial perceptual characteristics of the human visual system. The proposed method computes a spatial variation(SV), which is the difference between a pixel luminance and the average of its $3{\times}3$ neighborhood pixels' luminances weighted according to the spatial positioning. Information of edge enhancement(IEE) Is computed using the SV and the local average luminance. The IEE is added to the quantizer's input pixel and feeds into the halftoning quantizer. The quantizer produces the halftone image having the enhanced edge. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional methods by measuring the edge correlation. The halftone images by using the proposed method show better quality due to the enhanced edge. And the detailed edge is preserved in the halftone images by using the proposed method.