A secure pixel level self-recovery scheme for digital images

Abstract

This paper presents a secure image authentication scheme for tamper localization and recovery at pixel level. The proposed scheme encrypts the watermark comprising tamper localization code and self-recovery code using chaotic sequence to ensure security. This scheme uses pixel to block conversion technique for ensuring lossless recovery of the original image from an untampered watermarked image. For enhancing the localization accuracy, a multilevel tamper localization strategy is used. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme generates watermarked images with minimal information loss and can withstand copy-move, image splicing, content removal, vector quantization, collage and content only attacks. This scheme has better security, better tamper localization accuracy and better recovered image quality under extensive tampering and takes less computation time in comparison to the state-of-the-art schemes.