M-ary QIM Data Hiding for Error Concealment of Digital Image in JPEG Pipeline

The present paper proposes a scheme for error concealment of digital images(s) using data hiding in JPEG coding pipeline. The goal is achieved by embedding a low resolution version (image-digest) of an image into itself during compression using M-ary modulation. Halftoning technique is used to obtain the image digest from the low-resolution version of the image, while near-orthogonal quantization index modulation (QIM) is used for the implementation of M-ary modulation. At the decoder, this embedded watermark is extracted and is used as a reference to conceal the transmission losses in the received image. The simulation results show that the use of M-ary modulation provides more efficient performance measure with various loss blocks than traditional QIM, without decreasing the compatibility of standard JPEG coding scheme.