An image fragile watermark scheme based on chaotic image pattern and pixel-pairs

Fragile watermarking techniques for digital content have been studied in the past few years. Fragile watermarks are used to determine if a piece of watermarked digital content has been tampered, and distinguish tampered areas from non-tampered areas without referring to the original digital content. In this paper, a general framework for fragile watermark is proposed, and then a novel fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication is presented. The embedding process of fragile watermark starts from computing the difference image between the host image and its chaotic pattern, followed by mapping the difference image into a binary image. The binary image is then inserted into the least significant bit (LSB) bitplane of the host image. In addition, chaotic map is used to generate the chaotic pattern image, which can be used as secret key to improve the security of watermark algorithm. Due to employing permutation transform and chaotic image pattern, the corresponding position relation is broken between pixels in the watermarked image and the watermark. Simulation results and performance analysis show that the presented method is fast, secure and capable of detecting and localizing modification. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.