An invisible watermarking technique for image verification

We propose a new method for invisibly watermarking high-quality color and gray-scale images. This method is intended for use in image verification applications, where one is interested in knowing whether the content of an image has been altered since some earlier time, perhaps because of the act of a malicious party. It consists of both a watermark stamping process which embeds a watermark in a source image, and a watermark extraction process which extracts a watermark from a stamped image. The extracted watermark can be used to determine whether the image has been altered. The processing used in the stamping and extraction processes is presented. We also discuss some advantages of this technique over other invisible watermarking techniques for the verification application; these include a high degree of invisibility, color preservation, ease of decoding, and a high degree of protection against retention of the watermark after unauthorized alterations.