A New Semi-fragile Watermarking Scheme for Authentication and Tamper Localization in Remote Sensing Images

Recently, remotely sensed satellite images are a crucial source of data for geographical information systems and are used in many applications.The process of detecting any illegitimate alteration on the content of these images becomes a new challenge for content owners and distributors. To overcome this challenge, digital watermarking techniques are developed to authenticate the remote sensing (RS) images. These techniques are based on embedding a watermark into the image to produce an authenticated version of the image so that any attempts to change the content of the authenticated image will result a change in the watermark itself. In this paper, a new semi-fragile watermarking technique for image authentication is proposed based on integer wavelet transform (IWT). The watermark is decomposed into its bit-planes which are inserted into the bit-planes of the IWT details sub-bands of the RS image color bands. Experimental results show a good invisibility of the proposed scheme. Moreover, it is robust to some image processing attack such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise adding and filtering, but it is sensitive to malicious attack such as cut and paste. The scheme also can detect the tempering region exactly.