A novel reversible image authentication scheme for digital images

•In this paper, a reversible image authentication scheme based on predictive coding and histogram shifting is proposed.•The block-based authentication codes are generated for tamper detection.•The tampered areas in the modified image can be clearly detected.•The image integrity of the general-purposed images as well as the special-purposed image can be protected by using the proposed scheme.

Image authentication is to protect the image integrity when the digital image is illegally modified. Most of the image authentication schemes proposed so far employed the irreversible data hiding approach to embed the authentication data into the cover images. In this paper, a novel reversible image authentication scheme for digital images is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the authentication codes are generated by using the random number values induced by the selected random number seed. Then, the authentication codes are embedded into the cover image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves good detecting accuracy while keeping good image quality of the embedded image. The proposed reversible image authentication can be employed to protect the image integrity of the general-purposed images as well as the special-purposed images such as the medical and military images.