Spatial watermark for image verification

The recent development of digital multimedia communications together with the intrinsic capability of digital information to be copied and manipulated requires new copyright protection and content authentication schemes to be developed. This paper is devoted to the second issue, the one of image or video content authentication. A computationally efficient spatial watermarking technique for authentication of visual information, robust to small distortions caused by compression, is described. In essence, a content-dependent authentication data is embedded into the picture, by modifying the relationship of image projections throughout the entire image. To obtain a secure data embedding and extraction procedure, directions onto which image parts are projected depend on a secret key. In order to guarantee minimum visibility of the embedded data, the insertion process is used in conjunction with perceptual models, exploiting spatial domain masking effects. The viability of the method as a means for protecting the content is assessed under JPEG compression and semantic content modifications. With the present system, robustness to JPEG compression up to compression factors of about 1:10, can be achieved, maintaining the subjective image quality after watermark insertion. At the same time, it is possible to detect and localize small image manipulations.