Wavelet-based fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication

We propose a fragile watermarking scheme in the wavelet transform domain that is sensitive to all kinds of manipulations and has the ability to localize the tampered regions. To achieve high transparency (i.e., low embedding distortion) while providing protection to all coefficients, the embedder involves all the coefficients within a hierarchical neighborhood of each sparsely selected watermarkable coefficient during the watermark embedding process. The way the nonwatermarkable coefficients are involved in the embedding process is content-dependent and nondeterministic, which allows the proposed scheme to put up resistance to the so-called vector quantization attack, Holliman-Memon attack, collage attack, and transplantation attack. © 2007 SPIE and IS&T.