TSIA: A Novel Image Authentication Scheme for AMBTC-Based Compressed Images Using Turtle Shell Based Reference Matrix

• Main Authors: Chih-Cheng Chen, Chin-Chen Chang, Chia-Chen Lin, Guo-Dong Su
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Image authentication; AMBTC; compressed code; turtle shell based data hiding
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8854085/

This paper proposes a novel authentication scheme for absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) of a compressed image using turtle shell based data hiding. For simplicity, we call it turtle shell based image authentication method (TSIA in short). For each block, a 3-bit authentication code (AC) is generated by combining the bitmap with a pseudo-random sequence and is concealed into the corresponding quantization levels with the use of a reference matrix. In order to solve the problem of having a high quantization level lower or equal to a low quantization level caused after the hiding operation, an iterative embedding mechanism is employed in the proposed TSIA scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TSIA scheme outperforms previous works in the watermarked image quality with an increased PSNR of 0.16 dB and achieves high tampering detecting accuracy.