An image authentication scheme based on digital watermarking and image secret sharing

This paper presents an image authentication scheme that can verify the origin of the received image and, moreover, detect if the image has been tampered with. The underlying technologies of the scheme are digital watermarking and image secret sharing. Different from other schemes that use one piece of watermark information for one purpose and a different piece for another, the watermark information used for original verification is also utilized for tamper detection. Moreover, unlike other schemes that employ a fixed strength value for embedding watermarks, the scheme automatically utilizes two different strength values, one for flat regions and the other for complex regions. The experimental results prove that using different strength values increases the robustness of the watermark with little sacrifice in image quality. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme for the origin verification as well as the tamper detection.