A Secure Self-Embedding Watermarking Scheme for Ensuring Digital Image Integrity

Abstract

With the rise of digital communication and multimedia information exchange, unauthorized access and manipulation of multimedia content are on the rise. Tamper detection and recovery mechanisms are necessary for maintaining the authenticity and protection of the transmitted images. There is a need for novel self-embedding fragile watermarking techniques with improved tamper recovery capabilities. In this work, we present a new method for watermarking in which the cover image gets divided into 2x2 sized non-overlapping blocks. The watermark information is generated by using six MSBs of each pixel in the block. A key value for each block is used to generate a mapping block number for its respective block. The mapping block is used to embed recovery data for each block. The presented method is validated with the number of altered photos and varying tampering rates. The PSNR and SSIM results show that the proposed technique provides better performance.