Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08669-0 Large scale image tamper detection and restoration D. Sarkar 1 · S. Palit 2 · S. Som 3 · K. N. Dey 4 Received: 2 January 2019 / Revised: 3 December 2019 / Accepted: 9 January 2020 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Detection and restoration of greatly tampered images is an important albeit difficult prob- lem. Two schemes for the detection of tampered areas in images and their restoration have been presented. One of them works in the spatial domain and implements a quadruple water- marking approach. A watermark is constructed from four different parts of the image such that a filtered version of the image intensities contained in each of these parts is embedded identically in four other regions of the image. These regions are decided by a mapping algo- rithm. The advantage of this approach is that even if three of the four regions are tampered, the watermark from the untampered region can be used to reconstruct the three tampered regions. The chief motivation behind the quadruple scheme is the restoration of an image which has suffered tampering on a really large scale, upto 75%. The other proposed algo- rithm uses wavelet decomposition, based on which, two different watermarks are embedded. These serve two different purposes, one being tamper detection, while the second is restora- tion of the tampered area. They are embedded in non-overlapping regions of the wavelet transformed image. This algorithm is designed to obtain very good quality restoration and works well for tampering less than 50% of the total image area. The performance of both these algorithms has been examined using images from the entire USC-SIPI database. Com- parison has been made with a well known existing approach. The superiority of the proposed approaches is evident from the plots, figures and tables presented. Keywords Tampering · Quadruple watermarking · Mapping block · Restoration · Wavelet coefficients 1 Introduction Multimedia communication has experienced a tremendous growth in the past two decades. Images and videos are widely used as effective tools for presenting and transmitting infor- mation through the Internet. Sadly, yet inevitably, tampering of such media with malicious intentions is a common occurrence and is of widespread concern. The tampering can be simply a partial cropping of the image, removal of selected regions of it or degradations  S. Palit sarbanip@isical.ac.in Extended author information available on the last page of the article.