A Watermark-Based Scheme for Authenticating JPEG Image Integrity

JPEG is the most common image format in smartphones, computers, or digital cameras. Because numerous JPEG images are easily shared and distributed, there are privacy and security concerns for these images. Hence, the JPEG committee has started a standardization called JPEG privacy and security to resolve these issues. The forgery detection of a JPEG image is the key objective of JPEG privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a novel forgery detection method that is watermark-based, for authenticating JPEG image integrity in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The proposed method aims at 100% detection accuracy for typical forgeries on JPEG image DCT blocks and to counter a well-known forgery attack called collage attack. For this purpose, the method splits the host image into a group of blocks (GOB). A watermark is generated by collaborating with the neighboring GOBs and is embedded into the GOBs. The experimental results using various sample images show the superiority of the proposed method, exhibiting a negligible visual difference between the original and watermarked JPEG images.