Conventionally, the methods used for media verification are based on either digital signatures or watermarking. A digital signature is a set of features extracted from the media that sufficiently represents the content of the original media. Watermarking, on the other hand, is a media authentication/protection technique that embeds invisible (or inaudible) information into the media. For content authentication, the embedded watermark can be extracted and used for verification purposes. The major difference between a watermark and a digital signature is that the embedding process of the former requires the content of the media to change. However, both the watermark-based approach and the digital signature-based approach are expected to be sensitive to any malicious modification of the media. A good authentication system should be able to tolerate incidental modifications, such as image enhancement or JPEG compression (with a high enough quality factor not to introduce perceptual changes).
Hash functions are frequently called message digest functions. Their purpose is to extract a fixed-length bit string from a message (image, documents, etc.). Hash functions have found varied applications in various cryptographic, compiler and database search applications. In cryptography, hash functions are typically used for digital signatures to authenticate the message being sent so that the recipient can verify its source. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in using hash functions in multimedia applications both for security and indexing. A key feature of conventional cryptographic hashing algorithms such as message digest 5 (MD5) and secure hash algorithm 1 (SHA-1) is that they are extremely sensitive to the message, i.e. changing even one bit of the input will change the output dramatically. However, multimedia data such as digital images go through various manipulations such as compression, enhancement, cropping, and scaling. An image hash function should instead take into account the changes in the visual domain and produce hash values based on the image's visual appearance. Such a hash function would be useful in identifying images in databases, in which the image possibly undergoes incidental changes (such as compression and format changes, common signal processing operations, scanning or watermarking). A second significant application of a perceptual image hash could be for robust image authentication. In such cases, the hash must be invariant under perceptually insignificant modifications to the image but detect malicious tampering of image data. Several other applications can be identified in the areas of watermarking and information embedding in images.
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