Fragile Watermarking Scheme Research Articles

Self-Embedding Fragile Watermarking Scheme to Detect Image Tampering Using AMBTC and OPAP Approaches

Research on self-embedding watermarks is being actively conducted to solve personal privacy and copyright problems by image attack. In this paper, we propose a self-embedded watermarking technique based on Absolute Moment Block Truncation Coding (AMBTC) for reconstructing tampered images by cropping attacks and forgery. AMBTC is suitable as a recovery bit (watermark) for the tampered image. This is because AMBTC has excellent compression performance and image quality. Moreover, to improve the quality of the marked image, the Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP) method is used in the process of hiding AMBTC in the cover image. To find a damaged block in a marked image, the authentication data along with the watermark must be hidden in the block. We employ a checksum for authentication. The watermark is embedded in the pixels of the cover image using 3LSB and 2LSB, and the checksum is hidden in the LSB. Through the recovering procedure, it is possible to recover the original marked image from the tampered marked image. In addition, when the tampering ratio was 45%, the image (Lena) could be recovered at 36 dB. The proposed self-embedding method was verified through an experiment, and the result was the recovered image showed superior perceptual quality compared to the previous methods.

A hybrid-Sudoku based fragile watermarking scheme for image tampering detection

Protection of intellectual property rights has become one of the focuses of social concerning. To reduce those disputations, the watermark is implanted into the media by the content owner to declare original copyright. Among which, the high payload can achieve the accurate tampering localization, but maybe bring low visual quality watermarked image. Both accurate tampering localization and high watermarked image quality seem contradictory. For this, this paper proposes a hybrid-Sudoku based fragile watermarking scheme for digital image tampering detection. The hybrid-Sudoku based scheme provides a double perspective mechanism to embed the watermark. In the first perspective of the Sudoku, the watermark is virtually embedded into each pixel pair, resulting in the temporary coordinate information. Then, the temporary coordinate information is concealed into cover image based on the second perspective of the Sudoku. Finally, several common attacks are utilized to evaluate the tampering detection performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a considerable accuracy in tampering localization and provide the satisfactory visual quality of watermarked image, with PSNR of 47.80 dB. Additionally, the design enhances the security and imperceptive of the hidden watermark.

Cryptanalysis of a Self-Recovery Fragile Watermarking Scheme

Cryptanalysis of a Self-Recovery Fragile Watermarking Scheme

Blind semi-fragile watermarking scheme for video authentication in video surveillance context

With the development of advanced multimedia editing tools, numerous unauthorized manipulations are easily doable to surveillance systems video files. Thus, video tamper detection is revealed as a big challenge for multimedia security field researchers. Indeed, we propose herein a singular value decomposition (SVD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based semi fragile watermarking scheme for video content authentication. A content-based authentication signature is firstly generated by extracting reliable features from regions of interest. QR code generation technique as well as Arnold transform are used to boost the security aspect of the watermark. This latter is efficiently hidden in the wavelet middle frequency sub bands through an additive embedding algorithm and then extracted via a blind detection method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme jointly achieves a good perceptual quality and a high watermark capacity. In addition, it is capable of distinguishing intentional attacks from incidental modifications. Indeed, the proposed watermarking scheme is very fragile to malicious tampering while allowing non-malicious processing.

An effective image self-recovery based fragile watermarking using self-adaptive weight-based compressed AMBTC

The quality of the watermarked image is degraded by introducing a large amount of the watermark, which also draws more attention of malicious attackers. Therefore, it is important to improve the quality of a watermarked image and improve the restoration capability of a tampered image. For this, a novel self-recovery based fragile watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. To improve the watermarked image quality, a bit-reduction based AMBTC technology is employed to generate a watermark with fewer bits. The watermark is then embedded into the original image using turtle shell based data hiding technique. In the tampering detection phase, the high accuracy for tampering localization is achieved employing a two-level tampering detection strategy. Additionally, an effective self-adaptive weight-based recovery algorithm and an image inpainting algorithm are sequentially employed to provide improved recovered image quality. The experimental results show that the watermarked images appear to demonstrate higher quality (up to 49.76 dB), and the average PSNR of recovered images can be up to 34.65 dB, which is higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods.

Blind Image Watermarking for Localization and Restoration of Color Images

Digital images have become easy to generate and share with tremendous growth in communication technology. Therefore, the threat of forgery and tampering in digital images has also been increased. This study proposes a blind fragile watermarking scheme for color images to provide efficient image tamper detection and self-recovery. A secret key based pseudo random binary sequence is used as a fragile watermark for tamper detection. Likewise, the recovery information is preserved in a randomized manner using a secret key. During embedding, each channel of the RGB image is divided into non-overlapping 2 × 4 size blocks. Each block is then watermarked using a LSB (least significant bit) replacement process in 9-base notation structure. The watermark sequence (i.e. 12-bit) for each block contains 6-bits from the fragile watermark and concatenated with the recovery information (i.e. 6 MSB (most significant bit) of block's mean value) of a different block. The experimental results confirm that the scheme is highly efficient to locate tampered region and recover the original image even in case of serious tampering. The scheme offers nearly 99% accurate tamper detection and significant recovery of tampered images (up to 80% tampering rate). Comparative results prove the significance and superiority of the scheme over existing schemes.

Effective Self-Recovery and Tampering Localization Fragile Watermarking for Medical Images

It is increasingly important to achieve security and anti-counterfeiting for medical images. The integrity and verifiability of medical images before they are reviewed for potential medical diagnoses is imperative. This paper presents an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for medical images. Both self-recovery information and authentication code for each block are generated in advance and then embedded into other blocks separately with the help of the turtle shell and embedding table. In the tampering detection and localization phase, a three-level detection and localization strategy is employed to achieve higher accuracy for tampering localization. In the self-recovery phase, a two-hierarchical restoration method is exploited to achieve higher image quality in the recovered images. Several malicious attacks were tested to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of tampering detection and image recovery. Simulation results confirmed that the tampering detection rate can be up to 99.83% and the average PSNR of a recovered image can be up to 42.11 dB, both of which are higher than those of the Shehab et al.'s method.

An effective fragile watermarking scheme for color image tampering detection and self-recovery

In this paper, a fragile watermarking scheme for color-image authentication and self-recovery is proposed. Original image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, and for each i-th block, the watermarks used for recovery and authentication are generated, which are embedded into a different block according to an embedding sequence given by a permutation process. The designed scheme embeds the watermarks generated by each block within the 2-LSB, where a bit-adjustment phase is subsequently applied to increase the quality of the watermarked image. In order to increase the quality of the recovered image, we use in the post-processing stage the bilateral filter that efficiently suppresses noise preserving image edges. Additionally, in the tamper detection process high accuracy is achieved employing a hierarchical tamper detection algorithm. Finally, to solve tampering coincidence problem, three recovery watermarks are embedded in different positions to reconstruct a specific block, and a proposed inpainting algorithm is implemented to regenerate those regions affected by this problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the watermarked images appear to demonstrate higher quality, and the proposed novel scheme can reconstruct the alteration of extremely high rates (up to 80%), obtaining good quality for altered regions that are self-recovered with higher visual performance compared with a similar scheme from state of the-art methods.

A tamper detection suitable fragile watermarking scheme based on novel payload embedding strategy

Intentional tampering in digital image content is one of the common malpractices in the current digital arena. So in this paper, the authors have proposed a novel fragile watermarking scheme for the localization of tampered image content effectively. Proposed fragile watermarking scheme detects forged image content robustly in block level of two consecutive pixels. In this work, the watermark embedding procedure is comprised of two phases- i.e., authentication code generation from some selected salient bits of each pixel of the original image content, and encryption of the authentication code before realizing it for embedding into the insignificant bits of each pixel in the original cover image. The authentication code is computed from each block using Hamming Code. Subsequently, the encrypted code is concealed into the pixels of that particular block using the suggested payload embedding strategy i.e., pixel adjustment process. The proposed fragile watermarking procedure ensures the high level of security since the encrypted authentication code is embedded into the cover image through an indirect mechanism i.e. block-level pixel adjustment process. This scheme has been implemented and tested on several grayscale images in order to confirm the tampering detection capability against various image manipulation attacks. The experimental results exhibit better performance in terms of various perceptual quality measures like peak signal to noise ratio, structural similarity index, and image fidelity. Further, the presented results demonstrate that the scheme is suitable for detecting whether a concerned image has undergone any form of tampering or not and achieves standard results in terms of false-positive rate, false-negative rate, true positive rate, tamper detection accuracy, and normalized cross-correlation.

A DCT domain smart vicinity reliant fragile watermarking technique for DIBR 3D-TV

This work presents a vicinity reliant intelligent fragile watermarking scheme for depth image-based rendering technique used for three-dimensional television. Depth map of a centre image is implicitly inserted in the block-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) of the same using an aggregate, which also takes into account the presence of its neighbourhood blocks. Based upon the parity of a Boolean operation on the aggregate, parity is modulated which implicitly embeds the watermark. Genetic algorithm is then utilized to select the appropriate frequency bands in the DCT domain to become eligible for watermark embedding based on imperceptibility requirements. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme in terms of its resistance against a set of fragile watermarking attacks and its ability to detect and localize tempering attempts.

Toward watermarking compressed data in columnar database architectures

AbstractA digital watermark is a secret pattern of bits inserted in the data objects to verify the integrity of the contents or to identify ownership. It is an effective technique for protecting various databases against data copyright infringement, piracy, and data tampering in both relational and not‐only‐Structured Query Language (NoSQL) databases including columnar database. Unfortunately, most of the existing digital watermarking schemes do not take into consideration the side effects that watermarking might have on the database's important characteristics such as data compression and overall performance. Thus, we are in need of database watermarking schemes that are tailored to the target database systems' specific architecture so that it does not interfere with the database's characteristics and performance. Columnar database is a type of NoSQL database where its data are stored in a column‐wise manner. This facilitates better query processing (by leaving the unrelated attributes on the disk) as well as higher compression ratio. In this research, we propose a distortion‐free fragile watermarking scheme for the columnar database architecture without interfering its underlying data compression scheme and its overall performance. The proposed scheme is flexible and can be adapted to various distributions of data. We tested our proposed scheme on both synthetic and real‐world data, and proved its effectiveness.

A restorable fragile watermarking scheme with superior localization for both natural and text images

In this paper, we present a method for detecting and restoring tampered information in natural and text images. To take the detection ability, invisibility, and recovery quality into account for both natural and text images, this work generates the authentication watermark for each 4 × 4 block by a hash function and a variable capacity recovery watermark for each 2 × 2 block by allocating more bits to the textural blocks and fewer bits to the smooth ones. The authentication watermark and the recovery one are embedded in the original image by adopting different strategies based on a secret key. The multi-stage neighbor detection strategy is designed to locate the tampered image blocks accurately. The proposed scheme outperforms in invisibility, with detecting tampered locations and recovery of the tampered regions. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better recovery quality and invisibility for natural and text images due to a variable-capacity recovery watermark and superior localization. Further, the proposed method computationally is less expensive compared with the existing works.

A Bayer pattern-based fragile watermarking scheme for color image tamper detection and restoration

The security of multimedia documents becomes an urgent need, especially with the increasing image falsifications provided by the easy access and use of image manipulation tools. Hence, usage of image authentication techniques fulfills this need. In this paper, we propose an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for color images tamper detection and restoration. To decrease the capacity of insertion, a Bayer pattern is used to reduce the color host image into a gray-level watermark, to further improve the security Torus Automorphism permutation is used to scramble the gray-level watermark. In our algorithm, three copies of the watermark are inserted over three components (R, G, and B channels) of the color host image, providing a high probability of detection accuracy and recovery if one copy is destroyed. In the tamper detection process, a majority voting technique is used to determine the legitimacy of the image and recover the tampered regions after interpolating the extracted gray-level watermark. Using our proposed method, tampering rate can achieve 25% with a high visual quality of recovered image and PSNR values greater than 34 (dB). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method affords three major properties: the high quality of watermarked image, the sensitive tamper detection and high localization accuracy besides the high-quality of recovered image.

An enhanced fragile watermarking scheme to digital image protection and self-recovery

Recently, Sarreshtedari and Akhaee proposed a source-channel coding approach to digital image protection and self-recovery. This scheme is based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) encoding and Reed–Solomon (RS) code. The total watermark bit-budget includes three parts, the first part is composed of source encoder output bits used for image content self-recovery, the second part is composed of channel code parity bits used for correcting the errors of source encoder output bits, and the last part is composed of check bits used for detecting tampered areas of image. They claimed that their scheme greatly improves image recovery quality as a consequence of the designed source and channel codes. However, we consider that their scheme is ineffective under the condition of tampering channel parity bits. In fact, when attacker tampers image content, the channel parity bits will be generally changed. In this way, using the wrong channel parity bits to perform channel decoding, it will get wrong source coded data and the tampered image content will not be correctly recovered. Besides, their scheme has no tampering discrimination ability. If attacker only tampers the watermark bits, their scheme will still generate tampered-recognized image blocks list. Aiming to resolve these important design vulnerabilities, we propose an enhanced fragile watermarking scheme to digital image protection and self-recovery in this paper. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Secure and Robust Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Medical Images

Due to the advances in computer-based communication and health services over the past decade, the need for image security becomes urgent to address the requirements of both safety and non-safety in medical applications. This paper proposes a new fragile watermarking-based scheme for image authentication and self-recovery for medical applications. The proposed scheme locates image tampering as well as recovers the original image. A host image is broken into $4\times 4$ blocks and singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied by inserting the traces of block wise SVD into the least significant bit of the image pixels to figure out the transformation in the original image. Two authentication bits namely block authentication and self-recovery bits are used to survive the vector quantization attack. The insertion of self-recovery bits is determined with Arnold transformation, which recovers the original image even after a high tampering rate. SVD-based watermarking information improves the image authentication and provides a way to detect different attacked area of the watermarked image. The proposed scheme is tested against different types of attacks such as text removal attack, text insertion attack, and copy and paste attack. Compared with the state-of-the art methods, the proposed scheme greatly improves both tamper localization accuracy and the peak signal to noise ratio of self-recovered image.

Self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme to restoration of a tampered image using AMBTC

The problem of digital forgeries has become more and more serious in various fields like entertainment, digital forensics, and journalism. This paper proposes a self-embedding watermarking scheme f...

A Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Authentication of GIF Images

A Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Authentication of GIF Images

A Logistic Map-Based Fragile Watermarking Scheme of Digital Images with Tamper Detection

Integrity protection is one of the security mechanisms used to prevent the originality of the content from illegal manipulation. In this paper, the authors have proposed an efficient fragile watermarking scheme to localize the temper region in digital images. To ensure the image integrity, the watermark information insertion is realized into the cover image using a key matrix. A logistic map-based chaotic sequence is considered to produce both the key matrix and the watermark information. The proposed scheme is able to retain high visual quality watermarked image and can precisely detect the tampered region if the image undergoes any attack by various malicious tampering methods. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is presented by performing various malicious tampering attacks on the watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme has achieved the satisfactory performance. The proposed scheme gives better perceptual quality of watermarked image and low false tamper detection rates compared to some other related schemes.

Fragile image watermarking with pixel-wise recovery based on overlapping embedding strategy

In this paper, we propose a new fragile watermarking scheme with high-quality recovery capability based on overlapping embedding strategy. The block-wise mechanism for tampering localization and the pixel-wise mechanism for content recovery are collaborated in the proposed scheme. With the assist of interleaving operation, reference bits are derived from mean value of each overlapping block, and then are dispersedly embedded into 1 LSB or 2 LSB layers of the image, corresponding to horizontal-vertical mode and diagonal mode, respectively. Authentication bits are hidden into adaptive LSB layers of the central pixel for each block according to block complexity. On the receiver side, after locating tampered blocks and reconstructing mean-value bits, according to the types of tampered pixels in each overlapping block, three pixel-wise manners are exploited for tampering recovery based on different neighboring blocks. Even if the tampered area is extensive, the proposed scheme can achieve better quality of recovered image compared with some of state-of-the-art schemes.

An adjustable-purpose image watermarking technique by particle swarm optimization

Imperceptibility, security, capacity, and robustness are among many aspects of image watermarking design. An ideal watermarking system should embed a large amount of information perfectly securely, but with no visible degradation to the host image. Many researchers have geared efforts towards developing specific techniques for variant applications. In this paper, we propose an adjustable-purpose, reversible and fragile watermarking scheme for image watermarking by particle swarm optimization (PSO). In general, given any host image and watermark, our scheme can provide an optimal watermarking solution. First, the content of a host image is analyzed to extract significant regions of interest (ROIs) automatically. The remaining regions of non-interest (RONIs) are collated for embedding watermarks by different amounts of bits determined by PSO to achieve optimal watermarking. The parameters can be adjusted relying upon user’s watermarking purposes. Experimental results show that the proposed technique has accomplished higher capacity and higher PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) watermarking.