Source-channel coding-based watermarking for self-embedding of JPEG images

Watermarking-based self-embedding schemes designed to combat the kind of malicious tampering in which a portion of the image is replaced with the fake content are mostly developed for the uncompressed images; and thus, are vulnerable against image processing attacks such as noise addition and image compression. This drawback makes them impractical especially when applied to the popular JPEG domain. Based on modeling the tampering as a source-channel coding problem, a self-embedding scheme for digital images in JPEG domain is proposed in this paper. A compressed version of the original image protected against tampering with the help of proper channel coding approach forms the watermark of our proposed method. Source coding is applied to recover the lost content, while channel coding helps the watermarked image to tolerate tampering. Since the proposed method is designed based on the JPEG model, it can be efficiently integrated into the JPEG standard. Experimental results show that the proposed method offers robustness against attacks such as noise addition and recompression, which is the shortcoming of available existing uncompressed-domain image self-embedding schemes. Moreover, satisfactory performance of the proposed method is stated in comparison with the major existing JPEG domain self-embedding schemes in terms of better robustness and image quality.