An improved hierarchical fragile watermarking scheme using chaotic sequence sorting and subblock post-processing

The original hierarchical watermarking scheme for image tamper detection and recovery has simple computation and high performance precision which can achieve 2 × 2 subblock. However, four-scanning and blind attacks have been proposed recently on this scheme. We generalize these attacks and analyze the cause of security flaws. We think that it is promising to improve the original scheme's security and keep its merit at the same time. In order to defeat these attacks, we develop an improved method to generate a block mapping sequence by sorting the chaotic sequence and add the chaotic encryption and permutation based on the exact content of each subblock to be the post-processing of the 3-tuple watermark. Our method uses the simple watermarking scheme and satisfies the performance requirements of fragile watermarking, such as high-precision tamper detection, localization and recovery. Theoretical analysis and computer simulation demonstrate that our proposed scheme is much more secure and can overcome possible attacks.