Dual-purpose semi-fragile watermark: Authentication and recovery of digital images

This paper presents a framework based on a single dual-purpose semi-fragile watermark to verify the integrity of digital image along with the recovery of distorted image. The watermark is correlated to the host image for detecting the collage attack and then embedded in their respective wavelet subbands. Unlike the conventional block-based approaches, this work has the ability to determine the unverified regions concisely. Huffman and BCH coding are utilized while generating the watermark. Integer DCT has been exploited as it can be highly compressed by Huffman coding as compared to the conventional DCT contents. The proposed technique exhibits the flexibility between imperceptibility, robustness, and capacity. In addition, integer wavelet transform has been used to reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm. Evaluation of experimental investigation shows the performance of dual-purpose semi-fragile watermark.