New fragile authentication watermark for images

Abstract

We propose a new fragile watermark for image authentication. Based on the Yeung-Mintzer (see Proc. ICIP'97, Santa Barbara, California, 1997) scheme, the new watermark does not have certain security gaps common to many previously proposed fragile watermarks. A block cipher is used instead of binary look-up tables. Pixel values are perturbed by small quantities so that the cipher maps small pixel neighborhoods to a fixed binary logo. This process is further modified in order to embed image indices (time stamps) into disjoint blocks of every image. This is necessary for detection of collages from multiple authenticated images. We also formulate basic security requirements and investigate the security of the new scheme.