A fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication in mobile devices

With the rapid development of Internet, wireless communication and the camera-capable portable devices, digital images are easily distributed, copied and modified. This aspect is now so important that image content protection has become a major security issue. In recent years, fragile watermarking has been used as a technique to achieve image authentication and tampering localization. The main purpose of this work is to show that with the rapid development of mobile devices, now is possible to construct applications based on watermarking. In this paper, we present an implementation of a fragil watermarking scheme for image authentication in mobile devices. This watermarking scheme is based on chaos theory and was proposed in [1]. In such scheme a fragile signal that is sensitive to manipulations is embedded in the image so as to detect the image tampering inconsistency. The current implementation was made for an Android capable smartphone. Some experimental results regarding localization of tampered regions and execution times are presented. The current fragile image watermarking implementation might be applied to content authentication and integrity attestation in mobile e-commerce and e-governance.