Image authentication using chaotic mixing systems

A novel method for image authentication is proposed. A watermark signal is embedded in a grayscale or a color host image. The watermark key controls a set of parameters of a chaotic system used for the watermark generation. The use of chaotic mixing increases the security of the proposed method and provides the additional feature of imperceptible encryption of the image owner logo in the host image. The method succeeds in detecting any alteration made in a watermarked image. The proposed method is robust in high quality lossy image compression. It provides the user not only with a measure for the authenticity of the test image but also with an image map that highlights the unaltered image regions when selective tampering has been made.