Content-basedwatermarking for image authentication

Abstract

This paper is focused on digital image authentication, considered as the process of evaluating the integrity of image contents relatively to the original picture and of being able to detect, in an automatic way, malevolent content modifications. A computationally efficient watermarking technique for image authentication, robust to small distortions caused by compression is proposed and described. In essence, a content-dependent authentication data is embedded into the picture by exploiting the rank order relationship of image projections throughout the entire image. The viability of the proposed method as a means of protecting the content is assessed under JPEG compression and semantic content modifications.