A Secure Semi-Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Authentication and Recovery of Images Based On Wavelet Transform

Authentication of multimedia contents has gained much attention in recent times. In this paper, we propose a secure semi-fragile watermarking, with a choice of two watermarks to be embedded. This technique operates in integer wavelet domain and makes use of semi fragile watermarks for achieving better robustness. A self-recovering algorithm is employed, that hides the image digest into some Wavelet subbands to detect possible malevolent object manipulation undergone by the image (object replacing and/or deletion). The Semi-fragility makes the scheme tolerant for JPEG lossy compression as low as quality of 70%, and locate the tempered area accurately. In addition, the system ensures more security because the embedded watermarks are protected with private keys. The computational complexity is reduced using parameterized integer wavelet transform. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme guarantees the safety of watermark, image recovery and location of the tempered area accurately.

• Rafiullah Chamlawi
• Asifullah Khan
• Adnan Idris
• Zahid Munir

• Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT)
• Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)
• JPEG Compression
• Authentication and Self- Recovery.

[1] Ching-Yang Lin and Shi Fu-Chang, Semi-Fragile Watermarking for
authentication of JPEG visual contents.
[2] Alessandro Piva, Franco Bartolini and Roberto Caldelliy, Self recovery
authentication of images in the DWT domain, International Journal of
Image and Graphics Vol. 5, No. 1 149-165 (2005)
[3] Xiaoyun Wu, Junquan Hu, Zhixiong Gu, Jiwu Huang (contacting
author), A Secure Semi-Fragile Watermarking for Image
Authentication Based on Integer Wavelet Transform with Parameters,
Copyright ┬® 2005 Australian Computer Society, Inc. This paper
appeared at the Australasian Info: Security Workshop 2005,
[4] Meerward, P.and Uhl,A. watermark security via wavelet filter
parameterization. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on image processing, (3):
1027-1030 (2001)
[5] Ingemar J Cox, Methiw L Miller and Jeffery A Bloom, Digital
Watermarking. (2002).
[6] Liu, H.M., Liu, J.F, Huang, J.W, Huang, D.R. and Shi, Y.Q. (2002): A
robust DWT-based blind data hiding algorithm. Proc. of IEEE on
Circuits and Systems, (2):672 - II-675.
[7] Kurato Maeno, Qibin Sun, Shih-Fu Chang, Masayuki Suto, New Semi-
Fragile Image Authentication Watermarking Techniques, Using
Random Bias and Non-Uniform Quantization, IEEE Transactions on
Multimedia, Vol 8, No 1, (2006).