Statistical Fragile Watermarking Capable of Locating Individual Tampered Pixels

Capability of accurately locating tampered pixels is desirable in image authentication. We propose a novel statistical scheme of fragile watermarking, in which a set of tailor-made authentication data for each pixel together with some additional test data are embedded into the host image. On the authentication side, examining the pixels and their corresponding authentication data will reveal the exact pattern of the content modification. As long as the tampered area is not too extensive, two distinct probability distributions corresponding to tampered and original pixels can be used to exactly identify the tampered pixels.