A content-based image authentication system with lossless data hiding

In this paper, we present a novel content-based image authentication framework which embeds the authentication information into the host image using a lossless data hiding approach. In this framework the features of a target image are first extracted and signed using the digital signature algorithm (DSA). The authentication information is generated from the signature and the features are then inserted into the target image using a lossless data hiding algorithm. In this way, the unperturbed version of the original image can be obtained after the embedded data are extracted. An important advantage of our approach is that it can tolerate JPEG compression to a certain extent while rejecting common tampering to the image. The experimental results show that our framework works well with JPEG quality factors greater than or equal to 80 which are acceptable for most authentication applications.