Semi-fragile watermarking based on Zernike moments and integer wavelet transform

Abstract

A semi-fragile watermarking algorithm for digital image content authentication is proposed in this paper. The watermark is generated from the Zernike moments of the low frequency subband in IWT (integer wavelet transform) domain of the original image. This sort of image-dependent watermark can resist forgery attack and improve the watermark security. Watermark is embedded in the IWT domain of an image by exploiting the features of human visual system (HVS). It makes the high-fidelity and high-quality watermarked image. Moreover, we can distinguish mild distortion from severe distortion according to the difference of Zernike moments before and after attack. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is fragile to malicious tamper and can locate the tampered area accurately while is robust to content-preserved manipulation, such as JPEG lossy compression. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.