Semi-fragile watermarking scheme based on perceptual hash function (PHF) for image tampering detection

Abstract

The increasing performances of personal computers, as well as software of image processing, enable the easy manipulation of digital media content. Unfortunately, this easy manipulation makes the detection of changes in the multimedia content a very difficult task. Digital watermarking is among the most appropriate techniques to verify the integrity of multimedia content. In this paper, we propose a semi-fragile watermarking scheme for JPEG2000 image self-authentication that ensuring the robustness of the watermark against the compression attacks generated by the JPEG2000 encoder itself. The scheme is combined with the JPEG2000 encoder by embedding the generated watermark into the host image during the JPEG2000 compression process. To generate the watermark we suppose to use a perceptual hash function (PHF) operating on discrete wavelet coefficients of the host image. The proposed watermark generation process leads the system to verify the integrity of the image without the need to any file except for the watermarked image. The watermark is embedded during the JPEG2000 compression process after Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) step into the approximation sub-band coefficients of the five wavelet decomposition using Index Modulation Quantification (QIM), and can be extracted during image decoding. To prove the authentication of the image, the system compares the extracted watermark with the new watermark generated from the received image. Experimental results show that our proposed approach has not only an extremely high accuracy of tampering detection but also a relatively very high resistance against JPEG2000 compression attacks.