Semi-fragile self-recoverable watermarking algorithm based on wavelet group quantization and double authentication

• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-014-2188-7
• Publication Date: 2014-08-05T03:39:10Z
• Authors: Chunlei Li; Aihua Zhang; Zhoufeng Liu; Liang Liao; Di Huang
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Semi-fragile self-recoverable watermarking algorithms are important to meet various requirements such as security, robustness, localization, and image recovery. However, current approaches are not adequate for this importance. Thus, we propose a novel semi-fragile and self-recoverable watermarking algorithm based on a group quantization and double authentication method. In the proposed algorithm, a target image is first split into 16 ×16 image blocks. For each image block, a five-bit authentication watermark is generated from the first-order statistical moment of the block and then is embedded into the mid-frequency band of another image block by a novel group-based wavelet quantization method. With the generated watermarks, image security is enhanced by randomly permuting coefficients among a group and image robustness is improved by embedding the watermark in the largest coefficient inside a sub-group by significant difference parity quantization. The proposed double authentication ring structure effectively improves the image localization accuracy. Recovered image is a better approximate to the original image. Experimental comparisons of ours with other algorithms shows the effectiveness of the proposed self-recoverable and semi-fragile watermarking algorithm.