Alterable-capacity fragile watermarking scheme with restoration capability

To take invisibility and restoration quality into account, this paper proposes an alterable-capacity watermarking scheme. For each block of size 8 x 8 pixels, the alterable-length code is generated based on the roughness of it. The alterable-length watermark generated by the alterable-length code is divided into three parts and embedded in other three blocks based on the secret key. The authenticity of each block is determined by comparing the watermark reconstructed by the block content and the corresponding extracted watermark. To improve the quality of recovered images, two copies of the significant-code of each block are embedded in different blocks and the image inpainting method is adopted to recover the tampered blocks whose significant-code embedded in other blocks is destroyed. The alterable-payload watermark preserves adequate information of image blocks especially for texture images with as few bits as possible and takes into account invisibility, security and restoration quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves the quality of watermarked and reconstructed images and is resilient to the known forgery attacks. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.