Wave atom transform generated strong image hashing scheme

Abstract The rapid development of multimedia technology has resulted in a rising rate on digital unauthorized utilization and forgery, which makes the situation of image authentication increasingly severe. A novel strong image hashing scheme is proposed based on wave atom transform, which can better authenticate images by precisely distinguishing the malicious tampered images from the non-maliciously processed ones. Wave atom transform is employed since it has significantly sparser expansion and better characteristics of texture feature extraction than other traditional transforms. For better detection sensitivity, gray code is applied instead of natural binary code to optimize the hamming distance. Randomizations are also performed using Renyi chaotic map for the purposes of secure image hashing and key sensitivity. The experimental results show that the proposed strong scheme is robust to non-malicious content-preserving operations and also fragile to malicious content-altering operations. The scheme also outperforms DCT and DWT based schemes in terms of receiving operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Moreover, to provide an application-defined tradeoff, a security enhancement approach based on Renyi map is presented, which can further protect the integrity and secrecy of images.