Alpha Channel Fragile Watermarking for Color Image Integrity Protection

This paper presents a fragile watermarking algorithm‘m for the protection of the integrity of color images with alpha channel. The system is able to identify modified areas with very high probability, even with small color or transparency changes. The main characteristic of the algorithm is the embedding of the watermark by modifying the alpha channel, leaving the color channels untouched and introducing a very small error with respect to the host image. As a consequence, the resulting watermarked images have a very high peak signal-to-noise ratio. The security of the algorithm is based on a secret key defining the embedding space in which the watermark is inserted by means of the Karhunen–Loève transform (KLT) and a genetic algorithm (GA). Its high sensitivity to modifications is shown, proving the security of the whole system.