An efficient hidden marking approach for forensic and contents verification of digital images

Abstract

Recently, forensic tools have been presented for detecting the forged image and illegal image manipulations. This paper presents an efficient and simple image contents verifying approach acting as a forensic technique. The presented approach mechanism is built by adding a hidden mark in a secret images, this mark achieves image integrity verification and detecting the tampering or forgery in the secret/authentic images. The secret/authentic/authentic image is divided to two main partitions, each portion is segmented to small blocks. These blocks in one partition are used to mark the blocks of the second partition using data transform technique. Firstly, the sensitive image is marked according to a self-embedding method. Then, a transform domain is utilized in order to embed a block-based signature into another block of the same image. Common discrete transform domains like DWT, DCT, and DFT are examined individually. Different analyses and comparison measurements are employed. The DCT is proved to be the most suitable and efficient transform domain to be used with the proposed scheme. At the receiver side, the reverse process is performed to verify image integrity. As proved from the experiments, this mark-algorithm is not visible or observable and robust against various attacks.