Authentication of digital images and video: Generic models and a new contribution

This paper is focused on digital image and video authentication, considered as the process of evaluating the integrity of image contents relative to the original picture and of being able to detect, in an automatic way, malevolent content modifications. Generic models, corresponding to current approaches for content integrity evaluation - labeling and watermarking - are described, providing a common basis to compare existing techniques. Two labeling implementations are put forward. The first one is based on second-order image moments. It can be thought of as a low-level approach, where the emphasis is put on computational simplicity. The second one relies on image edges and tackles the problem of image/video integrity evaluation from a semantic, higher-level point of view. The viability of both methods, as a means of protecting the content, is assessed under JPEG and MPEG2 compression and non-authorized image modifications. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.