A New Public-Key Oblivious Fragile Watermarking for Image Authentication Using Discrete Cosine Transform

In this paper, a new oblivious fragile watermarking using discrete cosine transform is proposed. It is inspired by Wong's public key watermarking scheme proposed in 1998 and aims to improve its vulnerability towards possible attacks indicated by Barreto and Holliman. Instead of making use of contextual information and making it an inter-block dependent scheme, as suggested by Barreto, we adopt another approach to retain its blockwise independent property. Our scheme can avoid the conditions necessary for such attacks to be feasible. Furthermore, our scheme extracts the inherent image features and embed them into this image as the watermark. This relieves users from having to maintain a database of watermarks from various sources. Experimental results show that the watermark insertion procedure has little effect on the visual quality of the watermarked image. They also show our scheme can locate the modifications made to the watermarked image, including image scaling, cropping, geometric distortion, pixel value changes, etc.