Abstract
This paper proposes an image authentication method that detects tamper and localizes tampered areas efficiently. The efficiency of the proposed method is summarized as the following three points. 1) This method offers coarse-to-fine tamper localization by hierarchical data hiding so that further tamper detection is suppressed for blocks labeled as genuine in the uppper layer. 2) Since the image feature description in the top layer is hidden over an image, the proposed method enciphers the data in the top layer rather than enciphers all data in all layers. 3) The proposed method is based on the reversible data hiding scheme that does not use highly-costed compression technique. These three points makes the proposed method superior to the conventional methods using compression techniques and methods using multi-tiered data hiding that requires integrity verification in many blocks even the image is genuine. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
