‘Hop Horse’ Image Authentication Scheme

This paper proposes a novel scheme for securing and authenticating digital data. Although, the experiments were applied to digital images, it is valid for sound, and video without any modifications of the core scheme. The developed scheme could be applied to the encoded data at the sender and the receiver sides, apart from the compression and decompression processes. The watermark information is generated automatically from the input data and hidden into the Least Significant Bits (LSBs) of specified pixels according to innovative criteria. Experimentally, the received data is authenticated if it is 100% match the sent data, exposing both geometric and signal processing attacks. The hidden watermark is completely invisible, achieving Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) more than 67 decibels (dB) for grayscale images that vary in size and content. The developed scheme is evaluated by verifying images of the testing set before and after tampering, showing comparable performance. A comprehensive analysis for the experimental results revealed performance and efficiency of the proposed scheme is presented. An extensive review of previous work concerning image authentication approaches is presented, showing the need for robust and powerful authentication scheme.