Dual watermarking method for secure image authentication and recovery

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-fragile watermarking technique capable of verifying the authenticity and recovery of the image. The proposed approach has the capability to accurately detect and differentiate modifications applied on the watermarked image. Alteration sensitivity has been improved compared to previous approaches and it can concisely determine the region of the watermarked image where the integrity verification fails. Semi-fragility makes the proposed method tolerant against JPEG lossy compression and other acceptable modifications but sensitive to malicious attacks such as cutting and pasting. The exact low pass version of the image is recovered by using the lossless compression (Huffman coding). Simulation results demonstrate that the alteration sensitivity of the proposed authentication scheme is much better compared to the previous approaches.

A recent survey of self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication with recovery capability

“…Grouping is different in Table 2 using the frequency domain. Method [4,41,49,54] take advantage of robust watermarking for generating recovery bits inserted into the LL sub band on the DWT. The main drawback of this method is that computing is quite high and the watermark insertion capacity is low.…”

“…According to the mechanism of image capture feature, it can be divided into block-wise and pixel-wise mechanisms as shown in Fig. 1 from Cheng et al [30]; the block-wise algorithm [1][2][3][4][5][6] divides the original image into small blocks to embed a watermark, which may be a hash of the main content taken from each block. The block-wise algorithm can locate the damaged block, but the blocks may contain some original pixels, so that the accuracy of the localisation placement is decreasing.…”

“…This is a technique of inserting secret information or image's information into an original image prior to sending. The original image is the image where the confidential information is inserted, while the secret information is a watermark [2][3][4]. The watermark component selection is done by considering the purpose of the watermarking technique.…”

“…information, then the watermark is designed to be able to resist a variety of non-heretical attacks [4,21,[25][26][27][28][29].…”

“…For the purposes of authentication, fragile watermarking schemes can be categorised into two main categories as fragile watermarking pixel-wise schemes [12,[18][19][20]30] and fragile watermarking block-wise schemes [1,3,4,10,11,17,[21][22][23]. In the pixel-wise fragile watermarking scheme, the watermark information is generated from the grey pixel value of the host and inserted into the host pixel.…”