Images with self-correcting capabilities

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce two techniques for self-embedding an image in itself as a means for protecting the image content. After self-embedding, it is possible to recover portions of the image that have been cropped out, replaced, damaged, or otherwise tampered without accessing the original image. The first method is based on transforming small 8/spl times/8 blocks using a DCT, quantizing the coefficients, and carefully encoding them in the least significant bits of other, distant squares. This method provides very high quality of reconstruction but it is very fragile. The quality of the reconstructed image areas is roughly equivalent to a 50% quality JPEG compressed original. The second method uses a principle similar to differential encoding to embed a circular shift of the original image with decreased color depth into the original image. The quality of the reconstructed image gradually degrades with increasing amount of noise in the tampered image. The first technique can also be used as a fragile watermark for image authentication, while the second technique can be classified as a semi-robust watermark.