Content-based watermarking scheme for image authentication

A new watermarking scheme for image authentication is introduced. The watermark is generated from the invariant feature of image and the mean quantization method is adopted in watermark embedding. The watermarking scheme has two good qualities: first, two watermarks based on invariant feature are used to provide very good classification of malicious and incidental tampering, second the received image authentication needs no information about the original image and watermark. The algorithm can be implemented simply and practically like a small, individual image processing software associated with all kinds of network software. Experimental results show that the new scheme is indeed effective and practical for image authentication on the Internet.