Color image watermarking for content authentication and self-restoration applications based on a dual-domain approach

Abstract

Digital image watermarking has been witnessed as a powerful tool that can be used in image ownership identification, copyright protection and content authentication applications. In this paper, a dual-domain watermarking scheme for digital image authentication with self-recovery capabilities is proposed. The proposed scheme has a high ability to recover tampered image regions while pertaining high watermarking imperceptibility and high robustness under various types of attacks. The proposed scheme employs two watermarks: 1) content-dependent, and, 2) content-independent, where the content-dependent watermark contains two-bit sequences for authentication and recovery operations. The authentication bits are generated based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of each block, while the recovery bits are generated from the average value within selected sub-blocks. The independent watermark is embedded using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), whereas, the dependent watermark is embedded directly into the first and second least significant bits (LSB) of the image pixels. The developed dual-domain watermarking scheme has exhibited high robustness performance against various attacks with high imperceptibility and watermarking capacity as well. For authentication purposes, the proposed scheme incorporated three developed measures to detect the authenticity of the probe image, and, to accurately localize tampered regions. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme has a high imperceptibility, compared to other existing schemes, and can effectively distinguish malicious from incidental attacks with accurate tampering localization. Moreover, the proposed scheme exhibits high performance against moderate-to-strong incidental attacks such as noise and low-quality JPEG attacks.