Secure Digital Image Authentication

Image authentication techniques have recently gained great attention due to it importance for a large number of multimedia applications. Digital images are increasingly transmitted over non-secure channels such as the Internet. Therefore, military, medical and quality control images must be protected against attempts to manipulate them; such manipulations could tamper the decisions based on these images. To protect the authenticity of multimedia images, several approaches have been proposed. A combination of hard and soft authentication using two existing generic approximate message authentication codes (AMACs). The approaches include conventional cryptography, fragile and semi-fragile watermarking and digital signatures that are based on the image content. The aim of this paper is to present a survey and a comparison of emerging techniques for image authentication. Methods are classified according to the service they provide, that is strict or selective authentication, tamper detection, localization and reconstruction capabilities and robustness against different desired image processing operations.