Variable-Payload Self-Recovery Watermarking Scheme for Digital Image Authentication

Abstract

This paper proposes an image self-recovery fragile watermarking scheme with variable watermark embedding capacity.Both watermark embedding payload and security are taken into account.For each block of size 2×2 pixels,the features are extracted to generate the recovery watermark with different length——6 bits for a plain block and 12 bits for a texture block.The recovery watermark of an image block is inserted into the less significant bit planes of the other block based on the secret key.The validity of a block is determined by comparing the features computed by the block content with the ones reconstructed by the corresponding recovery watermark incorporating with its neighbor characteristic.The variable-capacity recovery watermark contains the adequate information of image block to as few bits as possible.The recovery watermark is inserted in the original image only once,and used to both tamper detection and tamper recovery in the proposed scheme.These strategies make the watermark embedded payload as low as possible and the ability against the constant-average attack to be improved.Experimental results show that the proposed scheme not only has the better quality of the watermarked and recovered images,but also resists the known counterfeiting attack such as the collage attack and the constant-average attack.