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Exploiting DCT masking effect to improve the perceptual quality of data hiding

This paper presents an innovative watermarking scheme which allows the insertion of information in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain increasing the perceptual quality of the watermarked images by exploiting the masking effect of the DCT coefficients. Indeed, we propose to make the strength of the embedded data adaptive by following the characteristics of the Human Visual System (HVS) with respect to image fruition. Improvements in the perceived quality of modified data are evaluated by means of various perceptual quality metrics as demonstrated by experimental results.