A survey of fragile watermarking-based image authentication techniques

Image authentication is a technique aimed at protecting digital image authenticity and integrity when it is illegally modified. In this review paper, a literature survey of the emerging techniques for fragile watermarking-based image authentication is presented. To present a detailed description of existing fragile watermarking-based image authentication schemes, several of the existing representative schemes are classified into three main types in the paper, namely, spatial domain, frequency domain, and compression domain. Each main type is divided into two subtypes, which depend on each existing scheme having either recoverable or unrecoverable features. A characteristic analysis for all introduced schemes and comparisons of them in terms of localization, reconstruction capacities and other criteria are also offered. Finally, the potential issues of fragile watermarking-based image authentication are pointed out in the conclusion.