Digital watermarking techniques have been used to assert the ownerships of digital images. The ownership information is embedded in an image as a watermark so that the owner of the image can be identified. However, many types of attacks have been used in attempts to break or remove embedded watermarks. Therefore, the watermark should be very robust against various kinds of attacks. Among them, the print-and-scan (PS) attack is very challenging because it not only alters the pixel values but also changes the positions of the original pixels. In this paper, we propose a watermarking system operating in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. The polarities of the DCT coefficients are modified for watermark embedding. This is done by considering the properties of DCT coefficients under the PS attack. The proposed system is able to maintain the image quality after watermarking and the embedded watermark is very robust against the PS attack as well.

In this letter, we present an authentication and recovery scheme to protect images. The image blocks are DCT transformed and then encoded with different patterns. An optimal selection is adopted to find the best pattern for each block which results in better image quality. Both the recovery and check data are embedded for data protection. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to identify and localize regions having been tampered with. Furthermore, good image quality for both watermarked and recovered images are effectively preserved.