Method and apparatus for watermarking images

摘要

Digital watermarks are embedded in image data (102)in order to enable authentication of the image data and/or replacement of rejected portions of the image data. Authentication codes are derived by comparing selected discrete cosine transform (DCT) (104) coefficients within DCT data (106) derived from the original, spatial-domain image data. The authentication codes thus generated are embedded in DCT coefficients (612) other than the ones which were used to derive the authentication codes. The resulting, watermarked data can be sent or made available to one or more recipients who can compress or otherwise use the watermarked data. Image data derived from the watermarked data-e.g, compressed versions of the watermarked data-can be authenticated by: extracting the embedded authentication codes, comparing DCT coefficients derived from the coefficients from which the original authentication codes were generated; and determining whether the compared DCT coefficients are consistent with the extracted authentication codes.