In this paper, we develop a robust image data hiding scheme based on multiple description coding of the signature image. At the transmitter, the signature image is encoded by balanced two-description scalar quantizers in the wavelet transform domain. The information of the two descriptions are embedded in the host image in the spatial domain with a masking factor derived from the gradient of the image intensity values. At the receiver, the multiple description decoder combines the information

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... each description and reconstructs the original signature image. We experiment the proposed scheme for embedding a gray-scale signature image of 128×128 pixels size in the spatial domain of the gray-scale host image of 512×512 pixels. Simulation results show that data embedding based on multiple description coding has low visible distortions in the host image and robustness to various signal processing and geometrical attacks, such as addition of noise, quantization, cropping and down-sampling.