Reference Sharing Mechanism for Watermark Self-Embedding
Abstract—This paper proposes two novel self-embedding watermarking schemes based
upon a reference sharing mechanism, in which the watermark to be embedded is a
reference derived from the original principal content in different regions and shared by
these regions for content restoration. After identifying tampered blocks, both the reference
data and the original content in the reserved area are used to recover the principal content
in the tampered area. By using the first scheme, the original data in five most significant bit
layers of a cover image can be recovered and the original watermarked image can also be
retrieved when the content replacement is not too extensive. In the second scheme, the host
content is decomposed into three levels, and the reference sharing methods with different
restoration capabilities are employed to protect the data at different levels. Therefore, the
lower the tampering rate, the more levels of content data are recovered, and the better the
quality of restored results.
I. INTRODUCTION
PURPOSE of fragile watermarking is to achieve multimedia content authentication by
imperceptibly embedding additional information into the host media [1], [2]. As some portion of
digital content may be replaced with fake information by an adversary, a number of fragile
watermarking schemes that can identify the modified areas and recover the original content have
been developed for cover images in various formats, such as binary images [3], JPEG images [4]
and uncompressed images [5]. One class of the fragile watermarking approaches is to divide a
host image into small blocks, and embed the fragile watermark into these blocks. The watermark
may be a hash of the principal content extracted from each block [6], [7]. Since image tampering
destroys matching between the content and the watermark in the corresponding blocks, the
tampered blocks can be revealed. In another class of the methods, i.e., pixel-wise
fragilewatermarking schemes, data derived from the gray values of host pixels are used as the
mark to be embedded into the host pixels themselves.
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