A High Fidelity Authentication Scheme for AMBTC Compressed Image Using Reference Table Encoding

In this paper, we propose a high-quality image authentication method based on absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) compressed images. The existing AMBTC authentication methods may not be able to detect certain malicious tampering due to the way that the authentication codes are generated. In addition, these methods also suffer from their embedding technique, which limits the improvement of marked image quality. In our method, each block is classified as either a smooth block or a complex one based on its smoothness. To enhance the image quality, we toggle bits in bitmap of smooth block to generate a set of authentication codes. The pixel pair matching (PPM) technique is used to embed the code that causes the least error into the quantization values. To reduce the computation cost, we only use the original and flipped bitmaps to generate authentication codes for complex blocks, and select the one that causes the least error for embedment. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only obtains higher marked image quality but also achieves better detection performance compared with prior works.