An Intelligent Blind Semi-fragile Watermarking Scheme for Effective Authentication and Tamper Detection of Digital Images Using Curvelet Transforms

Abstract

A novel intelligent semi-fragile watermarking scheme for authentication and tamper detection of digital images is proposed in this paper. This watermarking scheme involves embedding and extraction of the quantized first level Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCLT) coarse coefficients. The amount of quantization of the first level coarse DCLT coefficients of the input image is decided intelligently based on the energy contribution of the coefficients. At the receiver side, the extracted and generated first level coarse DCLT coefficients of the watermarked image is divided into blocks of uniform size. A feature similarity index value between each block of extracted and generated coefficients is compared and if the difference exceeds threshold, the block is marked as tampered. The watermarking scheme is blind and does not require any additional information to identify authenticity of the watermarked image. Experiments are conducted rigorously and the results reveal that the proposed method is robust than the existing method [1]. Better accuracy in localizing tampered regions is achieved compared to method [1].

TRLF: An Effective Semi-fragile Watermarking Method for Tamper Detection and Recovery based on LWT and FNN

“…The main drawback of [35,36] is low quality of the watermarked image. Another work in [37] proposed an intelligent blind semi-fragile watermarking scheme for authentication and tamper detection of digital images based on curvelet transforms. In this scheme, the watermark embedded in the quantized first level Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCLT) course coefficients.…”

“…The solution is using semi-fragile watermarking instead of fragile type. Finally, in semi-fragile watermarking methods [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37], watermark is designed to resist against nonintentional manipulations caused by image processing operations such as compression, geometric, salt and pepper noise, histogram equalization, Gaussian filter, sharpen, and other basic operations of image processing. Furthermore, the watermark is fragile and sensitive against intentional manipulations like content modified by fake information.…”