Semi-fragile Watermarking Technique for a Digital Camera

In this paper, we present a digital image authentication using semi-fragile watermarking techniques. The algorithm is robust to innocuous manipulations while detecting malicious manipulations. Specifically, the proposed method is designed for the purpose of the real time authentication of an image frame captured from a digital camera due to its easy H/W implementation, security and visible verification. To achieve the semi-fragile characteristics that survive a certain amount of compression, we employ the invariant property of DCT coefficients' quantization proposed by Lin and Chang [1]. The binary watermark bits are generated by exclusive ORing the binary logo with pseudo random binary sequences. Then watermark bits are embedded into the LSBs of pre-quantized DCT coefficients in the medium frequency range. Verification is carried out easily due to visually recognizable pattern of the logo extracted by exclusive ORing the LSBs of the embedded DCT coefficient with pseudo random number seeded by a secret key. By the experiment results, this method is not only robust to JPEG compression but also it detects powerfully alterations of the original image, such as the tempering of images.