A new image watermarking scheme for efficient tamper detection, localization and recovery

Due to the powerful image editing tools, image integrity protection is becoming important, for instance, in a court of law, news reports, insurance claims or telemedicine. Digital image watermarking is a technique to detect, localize and recover tampered image but the accuracy of performance by the existing methods is still an issue. This paper proposes a new watermarking embedding mechanism for effective image authentication with a recovery scheme. In the method, a host image is divided into blocks and the feature of each block is embedded in the block itself and another block as watermark. For detecting tampering, the extracted watermarked data is checked with source and destination block leading to more accuracy. The recovery data is extracted from the destination block which is intact. The proposed scheme achieves better results in terms of tamper detection accuracy and the quality of recovered image compared with the state-of-art schemes.