A modified dual watermarking scheme for digital images with tamper localization/detection and recovery capabilities

The privacy and integrity protection of digital documents specially the case of biomedical images is a vital subject in the current world of telecommunication and digital multimedia exchanges. In this paper, a modified semi robust digital image watermarking method with tamper detection and recovery ability is proposed. For this purpose, the proposed method comprises two stages. In the first stage, a specific order of the integer wavelet coefficient of the original image forms the watermark which prepares both tamper detection and recovery ability. These abilities are created by a specific parsing of watermark bits named as dual watermarking. In the second stage of the proposed method, watermark embedding and extraction procedures are done. To be more robust, a Convolutional Error Correction Code is employed in the watermark establishment process. In the extraction process, the probable tamper will be detected and the original image shall be recovered. This method is also improved to be adopted for reversible ROI recovery of medical images even in the presence of some kind of intentional and unintentional attacks. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a high performance in the case of tamper detection and is able to recover original images from noisy ones.