Design of a robust and secure digital signature scheme for image authentication over wireless channels

The introduction of 3G wireless communication systems, together with the invasive distribution of digital images and the growing concern on their originality triggers an emergent need of authenticating images received by unreliable channels, such as public Internet and wireless networks. To meet this need, a content-based image authentication scheme that is suitable for an insecure network and robust to transmission errors is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the scalability of a structural digital signature in order to achieve a good trade off between security and image transfer for networked image applications. In this scheme, multi-scale features are used to make digital signatures robust to image degradations and key-dependent parametric wavelet filters are employed to improve the security against forgery attacks. This scheme is also able to distinguish tampering areas in the attacked image. Experimental results show the robustness and validity of the proposed scheme.