Novel feature vector for image authentication

As the dissemination of images grows across the Internet, authentication of images is becoming an important research issue. Image watermarking techniques are the most used forms to authenticate an image, however they introduce distortions in the original image and are vulnerable to a multitude of attacks. In this paper we present a novel method to authenticate images. We propose that instead of watermarking images, we can authenticate an image by calculating an invariant feature vector which models the image based on its shape and illumination characteristics. We propose an algorithm to calculate such a robust feature vector which withstands a variety of attacks and hence can be a good alternative to watermarking techniques.