Image authentication techniques for surveillance applications

In automatic video surveillance (VS) systems, the issue of authenticating the video content is of primary importance. Given the ease with which digital images and videos can be manipulated, practically they do not have any value as legal proofs, if the possibility of authenticating their content is not provided. In this paper the problem of authenticating video surveillance image sequences is considered. After an introduction motivating the need for a watermarking-based authentication of VS sequences, a brief survey of the main watermarking-based authentication techniques is presented and the requirements that an authentication algorithm should satisfy for VS applications are discussed. A novel algorithm which is suitable for VS visual data authentication is also presented and the results obtained by applying it to test data are discussed.