A fragile color image watermarking framework focusing a new invisible domain

Authentication of multimedia contents attended a broad attention due to illegal copying of digital contents and unauthorized recording and distribution that leads cyber crime in a massive form. Our focused area is digital color image and its authentication. For this purpose we've already proposed and reported different fragile color image authentication frameworks that authenticate an image through embedding color watermarks into color host images in a secured way with the help of a secret key and a hash function. According to our LSB scheme which was proven efficient, we have distributed the watermark information into the LSB of 'Blue' value of the host image which is perceptually invisible to watermarked image. Presently our research encounters a new invisible zone within the bit pattern of color images. In this paper we are proposing a technique which will embed watermark information into the 'Green' value of host image. It will ensure the ownership authentication of the host image with the help of a user specific secret key to verify the authenticity, integrity and ownership of the image. At the watermark extraction end, we've used blind extraction method, i.e., neither the host image nor the watermark image is required at the time of watermark extraction.