Digital image self-recovery using unequal error protection

In this paper, an unequal error protection (UEP)-based scheme is presented to generate tamper-proof images, in which the lost content of the original image is recoverable despite the malicious tampering. For this purpose, a representation of the original image is embedded into itself, after being protected by the proper channel coding. Since better protection is considered for the more important bits of the image representation through a dynamic programming (DP) optimization scheme, they survive higher tampering rates than the less important image information. As a result, the quality of the restored image degrades with respect to the true tampering rate.