Watermarking with lowembedding distortion and self-propagating restoration capabilities

This paper presents a new fragile watermarking method, whereby two mechanisms are hierarchically structured to provide self-recovery capabilities. The first one is a secure block-wise mechanism, resilient to cropping, aimed at localising altered pixel-blocks. The second one is an iterative mechanism capable of reconstructing the original contents, by means of exhaustive attempts. The key features of the proposed method, which compare favourably to those of existing schemes, are low embedding distortion and resilience to cropping. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of restoring the altered contents, even when the tampered region covers up to 32% of the total pixels in the image. © 2012 IEEE.