METHOD AND UNIT FOR IMAGE PROCESSING, SERVED MEDIUM AND IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEM

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To imbed information into an image by preventing image quality deterioration to the utmost without increasing the quantity of the image data. SOLUTION: An imbedding coder 3 divides an image into a prescribed number of blocks and divides each block into bit planes including each bit of a bit stream denoting the values of the pixels of the block. Additional information is imbedded in the image after rearranging the bit planes corresponding to the additional information to obtain the imbedded image. On the other hand, an imbedding decoder 6 divides the imbedded image into blocks and divides each block into bit planes, obtains the correlation between bits of each bit plane of each block of the imbedded image, and rearranges the bit planes in the blocks of the imbedded image on the basis of the correlation so as to decode the original image and the additional information.