VLC-counted watermarking for JPEG image complete authentication

This paper proposes a fragile watermarking algorithm based on look-up table in bit domain. This scheme is simple and with low computational complexity because both watermark embedding and detecting are performed in the lowest domain (bit domain). This scheme can detect and localize alterations of the original image, such as the tampering of images exported from a digital camera. The experimental results show that this scheme has a low visual quality impact and is sensitive to image modification, so it can be used for JPEG image complete authentication.

I. Introduction

The rapid growth of Internet distribution of digital media has created an urgent need for copyright protection because of easy replication and modification. Digital watermarking, a scheme to embed special labels in digital sources, has made considerable progress in recent years. According to the capability of resistance to attack, watermarking is classified into robust, semi-fragile and fragile watermarking. Owing to different characteristic, the three classes watermarking above are applied to different field. Among them, fragile watermarking is generally used for complete authentication. The complete authentication embedding process is that robust feature data (also called signature) is extracted from image and inserted back into image as watermark. Marked image can't go through any manipulation, or else integrality will be destroyed. Just exploiting the above characteristics, the integrality of test image can be judged through comparison the signature with the extracted watermark. This paper mainly focuses on watermarking algorithm and ignores signature generation.