Semi-fragile watermarking for authenticating JPEG visual content

In this paper, we propose a semi-fragile watermarking technique that accepts JPEG lossy compression on the watermarked image to a pre-determined quality factor, and rejects malicious attacks. The authenticator can identify the positions of corrupted blacks, and recover them with approximation of the original ones. In addition to JPEG compression, adjustments of the brightness of the image within reasonable ranges, are also acceptable using the proposed authenticator. The security of the proposed method is achieved by using the secret block mapping function which controls the signature generating/embedding processes. Our authenticator is based on two invariant properties of DCT coefficients before and after JPEG compressions. They are deterministic so that no probabilistic decision is needed in the system. The first property shows that if we modify a DCT coefficient to an integral multiple of a quantization step, which is larger than the steps used in later JPEG compressions, then this coefficient can be exactly reconstructed after later acceptable JPEG compression. The second one is the invariant relationships between two coefficients in a block pair before and after JPEG compression. Therefore, we can use the second property to generate authentication signature, and use the first property to embed it as watermarks. There is no perceptible degradation between the watermarked image and the origianl. In additional to authentication signatures, we can also embed the recovery bits for recovering approximate pixel values in corrupted areas. Our authenticator utilizes the compressed bitstream, and thus avoids rounding errors in reconstructing DCT coefficients. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of this system. The system also guarantees no false alarms, i.e., no acceptable JPEG compression is rejected.