Content Authentication Based on JPEG-to-JPEG Watermarking

A content authentication technique based on JPEG-to-JPEG watermarking is proposed in this paper. In this technique, each 8×8 block in a JPEG compressed image is first processed by entropy decoding, and then the quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied to generate DCT coefficients: one DC coefficient and 63 AC coefficients in frequency coeffi- cients. The DCT AC coefficients are used to form zero planes in which the watermark is embedded by a chaotic map. In this way, the watermark information is embedded into JPEG compressed domain, and the output watermarked image is still a JPEG format. The proposed method is especially applicable to content authentication of JPEG image since the quantized coefficients are modified for embedding the watermark and the chaotic system possesses an important property with the high sensitivity on initial values. Experimental results show that the tamper regions are localized accurately when the watermarked JPEG image is maliciously tampered.