Joint near-lossless watermarking and compression for the authentication of remote sensing images

In this paper we present a new watermarking algorithm for joint near-lossless compression and authentication of remote sensing images. The adopted compression algorithm is the standard JPEG-LS algorithm. Our methodology has been designed by integrating into the standard JPEG-LS compression algorithm, by means of a stripe approach, a known authentication technique derived from Fridrich. This procedure points out two advantages: firstly, the produced bit-stream is perfectly compliant with the JPEG-LS standard, secondly, when the image has been decoded, it is always authenticated because information has been embedded in the reconstructed values. Near-lossless coding does not harm authentication procedure and robustness against different attacks is preserved.