Patent ID: 7751586

Claim:
An image processing apparatus comprising: a determining unit to determine an embed area of an image, wherein the embed area is within an area of the image that is not accessed by an application that uses an access area of the image; an embedding unit to embed at least one piece of embed information into the embed area determined by the determining unit, wherein the embedding unit enlarges the embed area by an enlargement amount to accommodate the at least one piece of embed information when the at least one piece of embed information is too large to be embedded into the embed area, and wherein the enlargement amount is determined by subtracting a size of the at least one piece of embed information from a difference between a size of the image and a size of the access area of the image that is accessed by the application; a quantizer to quantize the image embedded with the at least one piece of embed information; and an encoder to encode the image quantized by the quantizer.