Robust and discriminative image authentication based on sparse coding

Image authentication is usually approached by checking the preservation of some invariant features, which are expected to be both robust and discriminative so that content-preserving operations are accepted while content-altering manipulations are rejected. However, most of existing features have not obtained convincing performance due to insufficiency of experiments and over biasing of robustness. Motivated by the sparse coding strategy discovered in primary visual cortex, we explore the possibility of using sparse coding coefficients for image authentication. Through extensive experiments, we discover that the proposed feature bears great discrimination as well as robustness, which indicates the effectiveness of sparse coding as a new invariant feature for image authentication.