A secure image watermarking for tamper detection and localization

Data security has become a major concern of present time. Digital image watermarking is seen as a viable solution to ensure the integrity of image data. Watermarking algorithms can detect the presence of various attacks on images. In this work, a secure and efficient fragile image watermarking technique is proposed. The proposed watermarking algorithm aims to find image tampering and its location. The proposed approch is a spatial domain, block-based embedding technique. It introduces a unique key based embedding using SHA-1 (Secure Hashing Algorithm) hashing. The watermarked images have high PSNR and SSIM. The algorithm can handle various size of tampering, from very small to large. The proposed technique has been tested for a wide variety of tampering attacks like copy-paste, copy-move, constant average, and general tampering. It can efficiently detect tampering in the presence of these attacks.