A novel color image tampering detection and self-recovery based on fragile watermarking

In industrial applications, sensing devices' image data must be accurately identified and recovered to prevent economic losses. Nevertheless, most industrial image watermarking methods focus on grayscale images with difficulty in achieving superior performance in three parameters: watermarked image quality, tamper detection and content recovery quality. To resolve this issue, a color image tampering detection and self-recovery method based fragile watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, block-based regular marker with pixel-based continuous marker is used for watermark embedding to enhance the quality of watermarked images. Then, a feature extraction-based tampering detection scheme for diagonal blocks combined with three-layer authentication is developed to resist tampering attacks of diverse shapes and sizes. Additionally, the block pixel-level recovery mechanism along with the Smoothing Inpainting algorithm is designed to implement the high-quality recovery of tampered images. Compared with recent methods, experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the scheme on tamper detection and image self-recovery, in terms of the image recovery robustness, tamper localization and attack resistance. Our scheme has a PSNR value of 25.4921 dB and an SSIM value of 0.7728 for the recovered image at 90% tampering rate.