Fragile watermarking for medical image authentication based on DCT technique

With the advancement of internet and computer technology in the last decade, the ease of editing and altering digital images has significantly increased. Therefore, it is now more crucial than ever for sensitive industries, such as the medical field, to employ image authentication techniques in order to ensure that the images have not been altered. This paper presents a non-blind fragile watermarking technique for medical image authentication. The watermark is generated by downsampling the cover image and embedded into the high-frequency coefficients after applying DCT to the host image. The experimental results demonstrate that the presented technique produces a high watermarked image quality and offers a high sensitivity to various attacks like JPEG compression, collage, and vector quantization. Furthermore, the model localizes with high accuracy the tampered areas within the attacked image.