Compression tolerant watermarking for image verification

Digital watermarking is seen as a viable solution to authentication of multimedia data and hence its security, especially in a networked environment. We present a new watermarking technique to add a code to digital images in the spatial domain. This technique is further shown to be robust under common compression schemes, including lossy compression schemes. Watermark embedding is done keeping in mind the limitations of the human visual system. We have used a procedure for error diffusion so as to minimize the chances of image tampering. For the verification of the image, the original uncorrupted image is not required. Experimental results show that the watermark is robust to JPEG compression