A Novel Watermarking-Based Reversible Image Authentication Scheme

Nowadays, digital watermarking algorithms are widely applied to ownership protection and tampering detection of digital images. In this paper, we propose a novel reversible image authentication scheme based on watermarking techniques, which is employed to protect the rightful ownership and detect malicious manipulation over embedded images. In our scheme, the original image is firstly split into many non- overlapping blocks, then one-way function MD5 is used to compute the digest of every block and the digest is then inserted into the least significant bits of some selected pixels, the experimental results show that the proposed scheme is quite simple and the execution time is short. Moreover, the quality of the embedded image is very high, and if the image is authentic, the distortion due to embedding can be completely removed from the watermarked image after the hidden data has been extracted, in the meantime, the positions of the tampered parts are located correctly.