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The Internet is a widely open source to everyone to access Web pages. Using a web browser anyone can access websites. Because of this facility people can easily download images from websites without the owner's knowledge and use them in their own documents. Also image content may be modified for illegal purposes. Therefore a system is needed to authenticate images over the Web. Web image authentication is a challenging task that requires web crawlers to track and download images for authentication. Most of the known web image tracking engines such as TinEye and PicScout retrieve images according to the image infringement of the original image. However, these systems do not have the facility to authenticate the retrieved image, i.e. whether the retrieved image is similar to the original image or any image content alteration has occurred in the retrieved image and who is the copyrighted owner of the retrieved image.

In order to solve the above mentioned drawbacks this paper presents a framework to protect image content, track it over the internet and authenticate the content. The proposed framework is based on self-embedding (i.e. where secret data and a binary version of the image are encrypted and embedded into the image), tracking (i.e. where a web crawler traverses over the internet to download images) and self-authentication (i.e. where the binary version of the hidden data is extracted to authenticate the image). Also another advantage of the proposed system is that it does not need the original image for the authentication process.