Watermark Tampering Detection based on Magic Matrix

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and image processing technologies, images are susceptible to accidental or deliberate tampering attacks. This paper presents a watermark tampering detection method to address the challenges of marking and identifying image sources in specialized fields such as medicine and justice. A quaternary encoding matrix is proposed to map the geometric information of any arbitrary watermark onto the carrier image, bridging the watermark and the magic matrix that performs steganographic modifications. The specific magic matrix serves as the key to retrieving and visualizing the steganographically embedded watermark. In comparative experiments, our method shows a significant improvement over the existing method, with the peak signal-to-noise ratio of stego images being 24.58 dB higher and the Intersection over Union increasing by 20.30%. This demonstrates that our method effectively maintains the authentication and integrity of carrier images while producing high-quality images after steganography.