Authentication and recovery of an image by sharing and lattice-embedding

Based on sharing and lattice-embedding techniques, we present an authentication-recovery method for an image. The recovery data are shared among many shadows, then lattice-embedding is utilized to embed each shadow in the discrete cosine transform domain of an 8×8 block. The proposed method can resist certain content-preserving operations such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, and brightness adjustment, up to a tolerance level controlled by a quantization parameter value. The method can also resist certain security attacks such as a cut-and-paste attack, a collage attack, and a vector quantization attack. Compared with previous works, the proposed method has following major advantages and novelty: (1) the method does not require prediction of the tampering trace, and the tampered blocks are always recovered as long as the number of valid blocks reaches a threshold and (2) lattice-embedding yields smaller distortion than does parity-check quantization, and the latter was often used in reported works.