A self-recovery fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication with superior localization

To address the problems of the inferior localization and high probability of false rejection in existing self-recovery fragile watermarking algorithms, this paper proposes a new self-recovery fragile watermarking scheme with superior localization, and further discusses the probability of false rejection (PFR) and the probability of false acceptance (PFA) of the proposed scheme. Moreover, four measurements are defined to evaluate the quality of a recovered image. In the proposed algorithm, the original image is divided into 2×2 blocks to improve localization precision and decrease PFR under occurrence of random tampering. The PFR under occurrence of region tampering can be effectively decreased by randomly embedding the water-mark of each block in conjunction with a novel method of tamper detection. Compared with the current self-recovery fragile watermarking algorithms, the proposed scheme not only resolves the tamper detection problem of self-embedding water-marking, but also improves the robustness against the random tampering of self-embedding watermarking. In addition, the subjective measurements are provided to evaluate the performance of the self-recovery watermarking schemes for image authentication. Supported by the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China (Grant No. NCET-05-0794), Southwest Jiaotong University Doctors Innovation Funds (2007), and Application Basic Foundation of Sichuan Province, China (Grant No. 2006 J13-10-5)