An effective SVD-based image tampering detection and self-recovery using active watermarking

•A novel SVD-based image tamper detection and self-recovery by active watermarking is proposed.•A new aspect of singular values for each image׳s block is utilized to improve the detection rate.•The combination of 4×4 and 2×2 block sizes improved the recovered image׳s quality.•The proposed optimizations improved the scheme’s security against several malicious attacks.•The results showed the superiority of the algorithm in terms of accuracy, security and recovery.

In this paper, an effective tamper detection and self-recovery algorithm based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. This method generates two distinct tamper detection keys based on the singular value decomposition of the image blocks. Each generated tamper detection and self-recovery key is distinct for each image block and is encrypted using a secret key. A random block-mapping sequence and three unique optimizations are employed to improve the efficiency of the proposed tamper detection and the robustness against various security attacks, such as collage attack and constant-average attack. To improve the proposed tamper localization, a mixed block-partitioning technique for 4×4 and 2×2 blocks is utilized. The performance of the proposed scheme and its robustness against various tampering attacks is analyzed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tamper detection is superior in terms of tamper detection efficiency with a tamper detection rate higher than 99%, security robustness and self-recovery image quality for tamper ratio up to 55%.