A recoverable AMBTC authentication scheme using similarity embedding strategy

Wien Hong; Xiaoyu Zhou; Der-Chyuan Lou

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0212802

A recoverable AMBTC authentication scheme using similarity embedding strategy

PLoS One. 2019 Feb 27;14(2):e0212802. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212802. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Wien Hong¹, Xiaoyu Zhou¹, Der-Chyuan Lou^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Nanfang College of Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China.
² Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan.
³ Stroke Center and Department of Neurology, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou, New Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for authenticating the absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) compressed images with the capability to recover tampered blocks. The existing methods may not be able to detect some types of intentional tampering. Meanwhile, the tampered blocks are only recovered by their means, causing an unpleasant mosaic-like appearance. The proposed method classifies image blocks into groups according to their similarities, and the group information is recorded for the recovery purpose. The multiple copies of the group information are scrambled and embedded into the bitmap of smooth blocks. The dominant portions of quantization levels are adjusted to generate a set of authentication code candidates. The codes with the minimal distortion are embedded into the least significant bits (LSBs) of the quantization levels. The tampered blocks can be recovered by averaging those untampered ones with the same index. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves an excellent marked image quality and detectability, but also offers a satisfactory recovered result.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Computer Security*
Data Compression / methods*

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (under the grant MOST 107-2221-E-182-014- to DCL) and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (under the grant BMRPB30 to DCL). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.