Toward a robust image authentication method surviving JPEG lossy compression

This paper presents a robust image authentication approach that distinguishes malicious attacks from JPEG lossy compression. The authentication procedure calculates the relationships between important DCT coefficients in each pair of DCT blocks and pre-defined thresholds to form the authentication message, and then embeds the encryption of the authenticated message into other DCT coefficients. The message calculation and embedding procedure are based on two proposed quantization properties that always exist under different JPEG quantization tables. Therefore, the proposed image authentication approach can tolerate JPEG compression efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image authentication approach.