Numerous image content authentication schemes have been proposed to solve potential security problems in transmitting digital images via the Internet.Aiming at achieving high detection successful rates in image tamper areas localization,a novel image content authentication and self-recovery algorithm using rehashing model and reference matrix \({\text{M}} \)is proposed in this study.A series of hash functions compose a rehashing model for the sake of avoiding numerous collisions of the random authentication numbers in the procedure of image tamper detection.This scheme utilize the rehashing authentication information as the digital watermark to be embedded into the original image by means of the reference matrix \(\varvec{M} \),in order to authenticate the integrity of the received image.The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect tamper areas more accurately and recover image tamper content nearly up to 50%with an acceptable visual quality.