Block mapping and dual-matrix-based watermarking for image authentication with self-recovery capability.

Numerous image authentication techniques have been devised to address the potential security issue of malicious tampering with image content since digital images can be easily duplicated, modified, transformed and diffused via the Internet transmission. However, the existing works still remain many shortcomings in terms of the recovery incapability and detection accuracy with extensive tampering. To improve the performance of tamper detection and image recovery, we present a block mapping and dual-matrix-based watermarking scheme for image authentication with self-recovery capability in this paper. The to-be-embedded watermark information is composed of the authentication data and recovery data. The Authentication Feature Composition Calculation algorithm is proposed to generate the authentication data for image tamper detection and localization. Furthermore, the recovery data for tampered region recovery is comprised of self-recovery bits and mapped-recovery bits. The Set Partition in Hierarchical Trees encoding algorithm is applied to obtain the self-recovery bits, whereas the Rehashing Model-based Block Mapping algorithm is proposed to obtain the mapped-recovery bits for retrieving the damaged codes caused by tampering. Subsequently, the watermark information is embedded into the original image as digital watermarking with the guidance of a dual-matrix. The experimental results demonstrate that comparing with other state-of-the-art works, our proposed scheme not only improves the performance in recovery, but also extends the limitation of tampering rate up to 90%. Furthermore, it obtains a desirable image quality above 40 dB, large watermark payload up to 3.169 bpp, and the effective resistance to malicious attack, such as copy-move and collage attacks.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)