Effective Fragile Watermarking for Image Authentication with High-quality Recovery Capability

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an effective fragile image watermarking scheme for tampering detection and content recovery. Cover image is divided into a series of non-overlapping blocks and a block mapping relationship is constructed by the secret key. Several DCT coefficients with direct current and lower frequencies of the MSBs for each block are used to generate the reference bits, and different coefficients are assigned with different bit numbers for representation according to their importance. To enhance recovery performance, authentication bits are generated by the MSBs and the reference bits, respectively. After LSB substitution hiding, the embedded watermark bits in each block consist of the information of itself and its mapping blocks. On the receiver side, all blocks with tampered MSBs can be detected and recovered using the valid extracted reference bits. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.