A novel hash function based fragile watermarking method for image integrity

In recent years, tampering and altering of digital images have become easier with the rapid development of computer technologies such as digital image editing tools. Therefore, verification of image integrity and tamper detection of digital images have become a great challenge. Fragile watermarking is the most widely used method for protecting the integrity and content authenticity of the image. In this paper, by using SHA-256 hash function, a novel block based fragile watermark embedding and tamper detection method is proposed. In watermark embedding phase, host image is divided into 32x32 non-overlapped blocks. Each 32x32 block is then divided into four 16x16 nonoverlapped sub-blocks. The entire hash value of the first three sub-blocks is generated as a watermark using SHA-256 hash function. The generated 256-bit binary watermark is embedded into the least significant bits (LSBs) of the fourth sub-block and watermarked image is obtained. In tamper detection phase, the detection of tampered block has been performed by comparing the hash value obtained from the three sub-blocks with the extracted watermark from the fourth sub-block of the watermarked image. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated by applying linear and nonlinear attacks to the different regions of the watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed method detects all the tampered regions of the attacked images and high visual quality of watermarked images has been obtained.