One way to handle this is to create a new BufferedImage, and tell it's graphics object to draw your scaled image into the new BufferedImage:
final float FACTOR = 4f;
BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(new File("graphic.png"));
int scaleX = (int) (img.getWidth() * FACTOR);
int scaleY = (int) (img.getHeight() * FACTOR);
Image image = img.getScaledInstance(scaleX, scaleY, Image.SCALE_SMOOTH);
BufferedImage buffered = new BufferedImage(scaleX, scaleY, TYPE);
buffered.getGraphics().drawImage(image, 0, 0 , null);
That should do the trick without casting.