A logistic map based blind and fragile watermarking for tamper detection and localization in images

Abstract

In real-time data transmission, the protection of multimedia content from unauthorized access is pivotal. In this context, digital watermarking techniques have drawn significant attention from the past few decades. However, most of the reported techniques fail to achieve a good balance among the perceptual transparency, embedding capacity (EC), and robustness. Besides, tamper detection and localization are the two crucial aspects of any authentication based watermarking technique. This paper proposes a logistic map based fragile watermarking technique to efficiently detect and localize the tampered regions from the watermarked image (WI). The proposed technique takes advantage of the sensitivity property of the logistic map to generate the watermark bits. Next, these watermark bits are embedded in the rightmost least significant bits (LSBs) by performing the logical XOR operation between the first intermediate significant bits (ISBs) and the watermark bits. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can produce high quality WI with an average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 51.14 dB. Further, the proposed technique can efficiently detect and locate the tampering regions from the image with a high true positive rate, low false positive and negative rate. Additionally, the proposed technique exhibits an excellent ability to resist various intentional and unintentional attacks which makes it suitable for real-time applications.