An object of the present invention is to provide an information embedding/tamper
detecting apparatus and method capable of distinguishing between changes caused
by image processing and intentional image tampering, and further capable of localizing,
on a regional basis, a tampered position on an image. A tamper-detection-information
embedding apparatus 1 divides the image into a plurality of frequency bands
to obtain transform coefficients, and then generates a pseudo-random number series
by using key data, and further generates authentication data. The key data and
the authentication data are embedded in the transform coefficients of MRA and MRR,
respectively. the image in which the information is embedded is reconstructed by
using MRA and MRR. A tamper-detecting apparatus 2 extracts the key data
from MRA obtained by dividing the image into frequency bands and generates the
authentication data assumed to have been embedded, and further extracts the embedded
information from MRR. The image is divided in to a plurality of blocks composed
of a predetermined number of pixels. For each block, an information series embedded
in the transform coefficients of MRR representing the same spatial region as the
unit block is compared, for verification, with the corresponding authentication
data series so that the tamper is determined on a regional basis.