Authentication of Digital Images via Tree-Structured Digital Signature

Abstract

The existing digital data verification methods are able to detect tampered regions, but are too fragile to resist incidental manipulations. This paper proposes a new digital signature scheme which makes use of an image's contents to construct a tree-structured digital signature (TSDS) for image authentication. The characteristic of TSDS is that it can tolerate content-preserving modifications while detecting content-changing modifications. Many incidental manipulations, which were detected as malicious modifications in the previous dig- ital signature or fragile watermarking schemes, can be bypassed in the proposed scheme. Performance analysis and experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed scheme