Image authentication scheme based on self-embedding watermarking

Abstract

This paper presents a block-wise and content-based semi-fragile image watermarking authentication scheme with location and recovery capability. Firstly the image is segmented by two regions: Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Embedding (ROE). The watermark sequence is extracted from ROI and it is embedded into the middle frequency band of DCT coefficients of ROE. In the authentication stage, two watermark sequences extracted ROI and ROE, respectively, are used. If difference between both sequences of a ROI block is smaller than the predefined threshold value, the ROI block is determined authentic, otherwise the block is considered as tampered and it is recovered by the recovery process. The proposed scheme is evaluated from several points of view: watermark imperceptibility, capability of tamper detection, image quality of recovered regions and robustness of no-intentional manipulations, such as JPEG compression. The simulation results show fairly good performance of the proposed scheme. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.