Abstract: A JPEG2000 image authentication scheme which is compatible with the characteristics of progressive transmission and lossy-to-lossless compression is proposed. Embedding bit plane of every low frequency subbands is determined in codec based on the lowest compression bit rate. Authentication data are generated and embedded in low frequency subbands and recovery data are embedded in high frequency subbands. If the final transmitted bit rate is not less than the lowest compression bit rate, authentication data can be extracted to verify the authenticity of the image. If the entire bitstream is transmitted, distortions due to authentication data embedding can be recovered by embedding recovery data in high frequency subbands.