A character-based authentication scheme for Chinese calligraphy images

Digitalized Chinese calligraphy preserves the culture property but incurs the problem of the authentication. In this paper, we present a character-based authentication scheme for Chinese calligraphy images. In our proposed scheme, the calligraphy image is considered as a binary image. The edge information of Chinese characters in the binary calligraphy image is extracted to form a feature image. The feature image is compressed and acts as an authentication message, and the receiver can use it to verify the content of the received image. The proposed image authentication scheme can distinguish acceptable image processing from malicious manipulations. In addition, the size of the authentication message is small enough that it can be easily appended to the header of an image file. The experimental results show that our scheme can not only accept acceptable image processing but can also detect malicious manipulations. Furthermore, the location of tampered characters can be determined accurately.