A feature-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme in DWT domain

A novel semi-fragile watermarking scheme in DWT domain for image authentication and tamper localization is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme extracts content-based image features from the approximation subband in the wavelet domain to generate the watermark. Then the watermark is embedded into the middle frequency subband in the wavelet domain. For image authentication and tamper localization, the extracted watermark is compared with the extracted content-based image feature matrix. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust to common content-preserving image processing (such as lossy JPEG compression, noise-adding), while it is fragile to malicious tamper in images. In addition, the proposed scheme can detect the tamper location accurately.