A DWT-based Digital Watermarking Scheme for Image Tamper Detection, Localization, and Restoration

The provision of image tamper detection, localization and restoration forms an important requirement for modern multimedia and communication systems. A discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based watermarking scheme for this purpose is proposed in this communication. In our scheme, the original image is first partitioned into blocks of size 2 9 2 in which a 1D DWT is applied to produce a watermark which is embedded in four disjoint partitions of the image to enhance the chance of restoration of the image from different cropping attack-based tampers. The validity and superiority of the proposed scheme is verified through extensive simulations using different images of two extensively used image databases.