Semi-fragile watermarking for image tamper localization and self-recovery

This paper proposes a semi-fragile digital watermarking scheme for image tamper localization and self-recovery. Firstly, the authentication watermark is generated for tampered area localization. After that, for content recovery, the recovery watermark is calculated from high frequency band with redundancy free. Then, for the two type of watermarks, the DWT-based watermark embedding method makes our proposed scheme tolerable against friendly manipulations. Even some parts of the watermarked image are tampered and the corresponding embedded information are missing, we can still recover the image from the untouched area based on the localization results and compressive sensing. Moreover, the encryption algorithm based on chaotic function guarantees the safety of our two type of watermarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which is sensitive against malicious tamper and robust to some incidental manipulations (e.g. JPEG compression, slight noise addition, brightness/contract adjustment and format conversion).