Fragile watermarking scheme exploiting non-deterministic block-wise dependency

Block-wise dependency is recognized as a key requirement in fragile watermarking schemes to thwart the vector quantization (VQ) attack. It has also been observed that deterministic dependency is still susceptible to transplantation attack or even simple cover-up attack. In this work, a new fragile watermarking scheme exploiting non-deterministic dependency is proposed. To watermark the original image, each pixel is adjusted according to the consistency between a key-dependent binary watermark bit, the information from the pixel itself and the non-deterministic secret dependency information calculated from a neighborhood centered at that pixel. Localization resolution is enhanced with a post-processing operation on the output difference map.