An Image Authentication Method for Secure Internet-Based Communication in Human-Centric Computing

With the rapid development of computing technologies, human-centered computing (HCC) has become an emerging multidisciplinary area which integrates ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, and so on. When large amounts of information has to be mutually analyzed, HCC aims to bridge the gap between people and computing systems. However, ensuring a secure transmission becomes challenging in HCC because malicious hackers tend to tamper with the Internet data. The massive amount of counterfeited or tampered data on the Internet damage data trustworthiness and impede the progress of HCC. To address this problem, this study presented an image authentication method based on the residual histogram shifting technique. In this technique, an image histogram is generated using block-based processing. Then, the histogram is modified to achieve a high embedding capacity. By manipulating the image histogram, secret or authentication codes can be embedded in the image itself to prevent private information from being tampered without consent. The quality of the obtained stego image is preserved because the shifting of the histogram is controlled to be within the minimum degree. Moreover, the proposed image authentication method is a reversible scheme which can recover the original host image from the stego image. From the experimental results, it reveals that the proposed method provides larger hiding capacity than the state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining pleasing image qualities of the embedded images.