Imperceptible data embedding in sharply-contrasted binary images

Data embedding in sharply-contrasted binary images like text, drawing, signature and cartoon is a challenging issue due to simple pixel statistics in such images. Arbitrary modification to the pixels can be visually perceptible in the process of data embedding. The use of a valid perceptual model is important to minimize the effect of such visual distortion in binary images. In this paper, a novel perceptual model is used to embed significant amount of information such that the original and the marked images before and after data embedding process are perceptually similar. In our model, the distortion that occurs after flipping a pixel is estimated on the curvature-weighted distance difference (CWDD) measure between two contour segments.