Structural digital signature for image authentication: an incidental distortion resistant scheme

TLDR

Existing digital data verification methods detect tampered regions but are too fragile to resist incidental manipulations. This paper proposes a structural digital signature (SDS) that uses an image’s wavelet‑domain contents to authenticate images. The SDS tolerates content‑preserving edits while flagging content‑changing modifications, and performance analysis demonstrates its robustness for image authentication. Incidental manipulations that previously triggered false alarms are bypassed, and experimental results confirm the scheme’s superior authentication capability.

Abstract

The existing digital data verification methods are able to detect regions that have been tampered with, but are too fragile to resist incidental manipulations. This paper proposes a new digital signature scheme which makes use of an image's contents (in the wavelet transform domain) to construct a structural digital signature (SDS) for image authentication. The characteristic of the SDS is that it can tolerate content-preserving modifications while detecting content-changing modifications. Many incidental manipulations, which were detected as malicious modifications in the previous digital signature verification or fragile watermarking schemes, can be bypassed in the proposed scheme. Performance analysis is conducted and experimental results show that the new scheme is indeed superb for image authentication.