Watermark implementation in digital photography

Digital watermarking can be used for tamper proofing of images taken by digital cameras. Such tamper proofing can be applied in authentications for courtroom evidence, insurance claims, copyright claims and journalistic photography. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of digital watermarking in the digital camera environment using a fragile watermark embedded in the discrete wavelet domain of the images. We propose architecture to implement the scheme under the constraints of the digital camera environment, such as with a limited computation power. We also evaluate the versatility of the scheme to detect and characterize signal modifications from a number of distortions, such as substitution of data, filtering, and lossy compression, through software simulation. Results show that the proposed scheme is feasible and effective for authentication of images taken by digital cameras.