Fragile watermarking for image authentication based on DWT-SVD-DCT techniques

Many fragile watermarking schemes for image authentication have been proposed to protect the integrity of digital images. However, these schemes still yielded unsatisfactory image quality of the watermarked images and low accuracy of tamper detection. In this paper, we propose a new, fragile watermarking scheme for image authentication based on the combination of discrete wavelets transform (DWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and discrete cosines transform (DCT) algorithms. The feature coefficients are extracted and are used to embed the authentication code by using the quantization index modulation (QIM) process. To guarantee that the extracted authentication code is correct, the Gram-Schmidt process is used to adjust the feature coefficients. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme provides good quality watermarked images and achieves high accuracy of tamper detection under different attacks, i.e., direct cropping and object insertion attacks.