Digital Image Watermarking technique for tamper detection and restoration

Watermarking of images not only ensures image authentication but also helps in recovery of the digital images when being tampered and manipulated during transmission. Although there are numerous algorithms proposed for the watermark embedding resulting in self-recovery of images, but they work efficiently for the uncompressed domain making images defenseless against image compression attacks including addition of noise. Therefore, in order to counter these problems in JPEG domain, we propose a method that ensures self-recovery of JPEG images along with the detection of tampered area efficiently. Original image is compressed by source code and is secured against tampering using channel code. Thus, image itself is compressed and used as the watermark for embedding. The proposed method is then effectively merged with the JPEG image resulting in robust performance against the attacks of noise and also improved quality of recovered image.