A semi-fragile watermarking scheme based on SVD and VQ techniques

Abstract

Semi-fragile watermarking technique is effective for image authentication which is an important issue for safeguarding the integrity of digital images. It can be used to detect tampered regions and allow general image processing operation. In this paper, a novel semi-fragile watermarking technique based on SVD and VQ is proposed. The singular value can be against the image processing operation, and the coefficients of the matrix U and matrix V can represent the image feature. VQ is used to reduce the number of the image feature, and the VQ index is recorded to be the authentication criterion. The host image is transformed by SVD and image features are extracted from the SVD coefficients. VQ is then applied on these features where indices are obtained and embedded into the significant singular values. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can locate the tampered regions and allow for JPEG lossy compression. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.