Blind robust and self-embedding fragile image watermarking for image authentication and copyright protection with recovery capability

This paper proposes a dual watermarking scheme that can integrate the functions of authentication, copyright protection, and image recovery in the same cover image. The robust watermarking utilizes a single watermark using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain for copyright protection, while the fragile scheme utilizes two self-embedding watermarks in a spatial domain for authenticating and restoring digital image content. The mechanism of the two schemes is carried out sequentially and uses a block-based approach. A new blind robust watermarking is proposed using a quantitative property of intermediate frequency coefficient for embedding and adaptive embedding strength selection to balance transparency and robustness. Fragile watermarks are inserted into a robust watermarked image based on the improved replacement approach of the least significant bits. Experimental results show that the proposed method can withstand various processing attacks; enhance the accuracy of deceptive localization with good visual quality of image recovery.