A secure and improved self-embedding algorithm to combat digital document forgery

The recent digital revolution has facilitated communication, data portability and on-the-fly manipulation. Unfortunately, this has brought along some critical security vulnerabilities that put digital documents at risk. The problem is in the security mechanism adopted to secure these documents by means of encrypted passwords; however, this security shield does not actually protect the documents which are stored intact. We propose here a solution to this real world problem through a ID hash algorithm coupled with 2D iFFT (irreversible Fast Fourier Transform) to encrypt digital documents in the 2D spatial domain. Further by applying an imperceptible information hiding technique we can add another security layer which is resistant to noise and to a certain extent JPEG compression. We support this assertion by showing a practical example which is drawn from our set of experiments. This work exploits Jarvis' kernel to generate the error diffusion signal and the Wavelet-based Inverse Halftoning via De-convolution (WInHD) to recover the approximation of the original signal. Our method not only points out forgery but also allows legal or forensics expert gain access to the original document despite being manipulated. This would undoubtedly be very useful in cases of disputes or claims. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.