A semi-fragile wavelet transform watermarking scheme for content authentication of images

A novel semi-fragile watermarking scheme for the content authentication of images using wavelet transform (WT) is presented in this paper. It is tolerant to the embedded wavelet image compression methods based on WT such as embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW), set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) and embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT) in JPEG2000 to a pre-determined bit-plane, but is sensitive to all other malicious attacks. The image features are generated from the lowest-frequency (LF) subband of the original image as the embedded watermark. The watermark is embedded into the pre-determined bit-plane by adjusting the corresponding values in the given subband. In the process of watermarking authentication, we compare the image features generated from the LF subband of the received image with the embedded watermarking information (the image features of the original image) extracted from the pre-determined bit-plane in the given subband of the received image to decide whether the image is attacked maliciously or processed acceptably (the embedded wavelet compression). The most important advantage of our watermarking scheme is that the watermark information can be extracted from the watermarked image when detecting watermark, so the received image authentication needs no information about the original image or watermark. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of our proposed watermarking scheme.