Face region authentication and recovery system based on SPIHT and watermarking

The face regions of digital pictures are some of the principal target of tampering to generate a potential scandal, causing social and economic damages to involved persons. In this paper, we propose a face region authentication and recovery system, in which the face regions are automatically protected at the moment when the picture is taken by a digital camera. When the original face of the picture is replaced by another face by malicious person, the system can detect the tampered face and recover the original one. The proposed system consists of two stages: the face region protection stage and the face region tamper detection and recovery stage. In both stages, the face detection module based on the Viola-Jones algorithm, face region encoding/decoding modules based on the Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) algorithm and watermarking module based on Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) are used. These three algorithms, Viola-Jones detector, SPIHT and QIM, are determined as most adequate algorithms for proposed system after several evaluations. The experimental results show a high quality of the watermarked as well as the recovered images, obtaining average Peak Signals to Noise Ratios (PSNR) of more than 40 and 38 dB, respectively.