Image Authentication and Tampering Localization using Distributed Source Coding

Media authentication is important in content delivery via untrusted intermediaries, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Many differently encoded versions of a media file might exist. Our previous work applied distributed source coding to distinguish the legitimate diversity of encoded images from tampering. An authentication decoder was supplied with a Slepian-Wolf encoded lossy version of the image as authentication data. Distributed source coding provided the desired robustness against legitimate encoding variations, while detecting illegitimate modification. We augment the decoder to localize tampering in an image already deemed to be unauthentic. The localization decoder requires only incremental localization data beyond the authentication data since we use rate-adaptive distributed source codes. Both decoders perform joint bitplane decoding, rather than conditional bitplane decoding. Our results demonstrate that tampered image blocks can be identified with high probability using authentication plus localization data of only a few hundred bytes for a 512times512 image.