Self-Embedding Authentication Watermarking with Effective Tampered Location Detection and High-Quality Image Recovery

Sensors (Basel). 2019 May 16;19(10):2267. doi: 10.3390/s19102267.

Abstract

Recently, sensor networks have emerged as a high-impact research area, and a number of high profile applications have been proposed. Although significant progress has already been made on securing basic network protocols, additional research is needed to produce techniques and methods for protecting canonical tasks in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an effective self-embedding authentication watermarking method for tampered location detection and image recovery. The proposed detection method is classified into block-wise and pixel-wise. In block-wise detection, if the size of the block is small, the false positive rate (FPR) will be low. In pixel-wise detection, when the tampered pixels are detected, only the corresponding pixel area is marked. Therefore, the FPR will be lower than that of the block-wise detection. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method was effective, and accurate tamper detection and high-quality recovery can be realized even in highly tampered images.

Keywords: fragile watermarking method; image authentication scheme; image stenography; self-recovery; tamper detection; wireless sensor networks.