Probability-based reversible image authentication scheme for image demosaicking

•A reversible tamper detection scheme for demosaicked images is proposed.•The authentication data is embedded the un-sampled components of the demosaicked pixels.•The tampered areas in the modified images can be clearly detected by using the proposed scheme.•The proposed scheme can be applied to any image demosaicking technique subject to image integrity protection.

In this paper, we propose a novel image authentication scheme to detect the tampered areas for image demosaicking with the reversibility preserving property. Image demosaicking is the process of reconstructing an RGB color image from the sampled data acquired by the digital camera that applies a color filter array to a single sensor. In the proposed scheme, the authentication data is embedded into the rebuilt components of the demosaicked pixels.From the results, it is shown that good image qualities of the embedded images are obtained by using the proposed scheme. When the illegal users modified the contents of the embedded images, the tampered areas in the modified images can be clearly detected by using the proposed scheme. The demosaicked images can be losslessly recovered if no modifications are done on the embedded images. The proposed authentication codes embedding process can be implemented by hardware in single sensor digital camera. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be extended to protect the image integrity for cloud computing environments.