Abstract
Recently, researchers have proposed semi-fragile watermarking techniques with the additional capability of image recovery. However, these approaches have certain limitations with respect to capacity, imperceptibility, and robustness. In this paper, we are proposing two independent watermarks, one for image recovery and the other for authentication. The first watermark (image digest), a highly compressed version of the original image itself, is used to recover the distorted image. Unlike the traditional quantisation matrix, genetic programming based matrices are used for compression purposes. These matrices are based on the local characteristics of the original image. Furthermore, a second watermark, which is a pseudo-random binary matrix, is generated to authenticate the host image precisely. Experimental results show that the semi-fragility of the watermarks makes the proposed scheme tolerant of JPEG lossy compression and it locates the tampered regions accurately.