Dual domain watermarking for authentication and compression of cultural heritage images

This paper proposes an approach for the combined image authentication and compression of color images by making use of a digital watermarking and data hiding framework. The digital watermark is comprised of two components: a soft-authenticator watermark for authentication and tamper assessment of the given image, and a chrominance watermark employed to improve the efficiency of compression. The multipurpose watermark is designed by exploiting the orthogonality of various domains used for authentication, color decomposition and watermark insertion. The approach is implemented as a DCT-DWT dual domain algorithm and is applied for the protection and compression of cultural heritage imagery. Analysis is provided to characterize the behavior of the scheme under ideal conditions. Simulations and comparisons of the proposed approach with state-of-the-art existing work demonstrate the potential of the overall scheme.