Fragile watermarking for image authentication using the characteristic of SVD

Abstract

Digital image authentication has become a hot topic in the last few years. In this paper, a pixel-based fragile watermarking method is presented for image tamper identification and localization. By analyzing the left and right singular matrices of SVD, it is found that the matrix product between the first column of the left singular matrix and the transposition of the first column in the right singular matrix is closely related to the image texture features. Based on this characteristic, a binary watermark consisting of image texture information is generated and inserted into the least significant bit (LSB) of the original host image. To improve the security of the presented algorithm, the Arnold transform is applied twice in the watermark embedding process. Experimental results indicate that the proposed watermarking algorithm has high security and perceptual invisibility. Moreover, it can detect and locate the tampered region effectively for various malicious attacks.