Fragile Watermarking With Error-Free Restoration Capability

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel fragile watermarking scheme capable of perfectly recovering the original image from its tampered version. In the scheme, a tailor-made watermark consisting of reference-bits and check-bits is embedded into the host image using a lossless data hiding method. On the receiver side, by comparing the extracted and calculated check-bits, one can identify the tampered image-blocks. Then, the reliable reference-bits extracted from other blocks are used to exactly reconstruct the original image. Although content replacement may destroy a portion of the embedded watermark data, as long as the tampered area is not too extensive, the original image information can be restored without any error.