Blind fragile image watermarking based on Vector Quantization and Block Truncation Coding

This letter presents a novel image watermarking scheme based on Vector Quantization (VQ) and Block Truncation Coding (BTC). During the embedding process, for each image block, if the corresponding bit to be embedded is '1 ', then VQ is applied to encode it. Otherwise, BTC is adopted to encode it. During the extraction process, for each input image block, if the distortion of the BTC-encoded result is less than that of the VQ-encoded result, the extracted secret bit is '0'. Otherwise, the embedded secret bit is '1 '. It is a blind image-watermarking scheme whose extraction process does not require the original image. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking method is fragile to most image processing operations and various kinds of attacks while keeping the invisibility very well, our scheme can be, therefore, used for content authentication. © 2011 ISSN 2185-2766.