Active approach for tamper detection with robustness to lossy compression

Active tamper detection using watermarking technique can localize the tampered area and recover the lost information. In this paper, we propose an approach that the watermark is robust to legitimate lossy compression, fragile to malicious tampering and capable of recovery. We embed the watermark bits in the direct current value of energy concentration transform domain coefficients. Let the original watermark bits be content dependent and apply error correction coding to them before embedded to the image. While indicating the tampered area, the extracted bits from a suspicious image can be further decoded and then used to roughly recover the corresponding area. We also theoretically study the image quality and bit error rate. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.