imageswithself-correctingcapabilities.docVIP

IMAGES WITH SELF-CORRECTING CAPABILITIES??? a,bJiri Fridrich and aMiroslav Goljan aCenter for Intelligent Systems, SUNY Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000 bMission Research Corporation, 1720 Randolph Rd SE, Albuquerque, NM 87501 fridrich, bg22976@binghamton.edu SUNY Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000 ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce two techniques for self-embedding an image into itself as a means for protecting the image content. After selfembedding, it is possible to recover portions of the image that have been cropped out, replaced, damaged, or otherwise tampered. The first method is based on transforming small 8(8 blocks using a DCT, quantizing the coefficients, and carefully encoding them in the least significant bits of other, distant squares. This method provides a very high quality of reconstruction but it is very fragile. The second method is based on differential encoding and the quality of the reconstructed image gradually degrades with increasing amount of noise in the tampered image. 1. INTRODUCTION Powerful publicly available image processing software packages such as Adobe PhotoShop or PaintShop Pro make digital forgeries a reality. Feathered cropping enables replacing or adding features without causing detectable edges. It is also possible to carefully cut out portions of several images and combine them together while leaving barely detectable traces. In the past, several techniques based on data hiding in images have been designed as a means for detecting tampering. The redundancy of images can be utilized to insert some additional information for the purpose of detecting changes and for image authentication. If the inserted watermark is fragile so that any manipulation of pixels will disturb its integrity, one can easily detect the tampered areas by checking for presence of this fragile watermark. One of the first techniques used for detection of image tampering was based on inserting check-sums of gray levels determined fro