Pattern-Based Data Hiding for Binary Image Authentication by Connectivity-Preserving

In this paper, a novel blind data hiding method for binary images authentication aims at preserving the connectivity of pixels in a local neighborhood is proposed. The "flippability" of a pixel is determined by imposing three transition criteria in a 3 times 3 moving window centered at the pixel. The "embeddability" of a block is invariant in the watermark embedding process, hence the watermark can be extracted without referring to the original image. The "uneven embeddability" of the host image is handled by embedding the watermark only in those "embeddable" blocks. The locations are chosen in such a way that the visual quality of the watermarked image is guaranteed. Different types of blocks are studied and their abilities to increase the capacity are compared. The problem of how to locate the "embeddable" pixels in a block for different block schemes is addressed which facilitates the incorporation of the cryptographic signature as the hard authenticator watermark to ensure integrity and authenticity of the image. Discussions on the security considerations, visual quality against capacity, counter measures against steganalysis and analysis of the computational load are provided. Comparisons with prior methods show superiority of the proposed scheme