Fragile digital image watermarking with restoration capability

This paper gives an auto-restorable fragile watermarking algorithm for image content authentication, which can not only detect the location of any minute changes in images but also restore the altered image data. Firstly, authors give called cross-interleaved-RS code block generation scheme. Then authors use parities of the cross-interleaved-RS block-based codes as watermarking and embed them into the lowest bits of the image data. Finally, authors use these cross-interleaved-RS codes to detect watermarking, identify the change positions and restore the altered data in an image. In addition, a mask image generated by a secret algorithm is participated in the procedure of cross-interleaved-RS encoding to increase the security of watermarking and prevent forged watermarking. Experimental results demonstrate that the watermarking produced by above method is sensitive to tiny changes in images, and the method also provides very good results of detecting the tampered location and restoring the tampered data.