Title: Pixel recurrence based image watermarking for block based integrity verification

Authors: Radha Ramesh Murapaka; A.V.S. Pavan Kumar; Aditya Kumar Sahu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology, Gandhi Institute of Engineering and Technology University, Gunupur, Odisha 765022, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology, Gandhi Institute of Engineering and Technology University, Gunupur, Odisha 765022, India ' Amrita School of Computing, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, 522503, India

Abstract: This paper proposes a pixel recurrence-based digital image watermarking (PRDIW) scheme to identify the tampered blocks from an image. The proposed scheme obtains two mirrored image (MI) blocks consisting of 2×2 pixels from each carrier image (CI) pixel block. Next, a one-digit integrity value (iv_one) is computed from each block and encoded inside the block to identify the tampered blocks successfully. Additionally, the proposed scheme is reversible. Therefore, it can successfully recover the CI and the encoded watermark bits at the receiving end. The results of the proposed scheme suggest that the quality of the obtained watermarked images (WIs) is superior, with an average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 56.11 dB, 54.68 dB and 53.05 dB, 51.68 dB while watermarking 65,536 and 131,072 bits, respectively. At the same time, the structural similarity index (SSIM) for the entire obtained watermarked image is superior to that of the existing works.

Keywords: digital image watermarking; integrity; reversibility; watermarked image.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2025.145866

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2025 Vol.17 No.3, pp.307 - 326

Received: 12 Nov 2022
Accepted: 10 Jan 2023
Published online: 30 Apr 2025 *

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