Chaos-based self-embedding fragile watermarking with flexible watermark payload

This paper proposes a self-embedding watermarking scheme that reduces the watermark payload significantly while maintaining good recovery quality and security. The embedded watermark contributes to the tamper detection and content recovery and is composed of only the compression codes of the image content. The compression codes with variable length are generated according to the roughness of the image. To improve the security, a chaos-based pseudorandom sequence generator is adopted to generate block-mapping sequence and encrypt compression codes. The proposed method takes into account the invisibility, recovery quality, and security using the flexible watermark payload, which preserves sufficient information of the image block with as few bits as possible. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only outperforms conventional self-embedding fragile watermarking algorithms in tamper detection and recovery, but also improve the security against the various counterfeiting attacks.