An effective image self-recovery based fragile watermarking using self-adaptive weight-based compressed AMBTC

The quality of the watermarked image is degraded by introducing a large amount of the watermark, which also draws more attention of malicious attackers. Therefore, it is important to improve the quality of a watermarked image and improve the restoration capability of a tampered image. For this, a novel self-recovery based fragile watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. To improve the watermarked image quality, a bit-reduction based AMBTC technology is employed to generate a watermark with fewer bits. The watermark is then embedded into the original image using turtle shell based data hiding technique. In the tampering detection phase, the high accuracy for tampering localization is achieved employing a two-level tampering detection strategy. Additionally, an effective self-adaptive weight-based recovery algorithm and an image inpainting algorithm are sequentially employed to provide improved recovered image quality. The experimental results show that the watermarked images appear to demonstrate higher quality (up to 49.76 dB), and the average PSNR of recovered images can be up to 34.65 dB, which is higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods.