Abstract—Tamper detection and recovery have been successfully modeled as a source-channel coding problem for an erasure channel. Set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) and Reed Solomon (RS) codes have been proven very effective for source and channel coding. This paper presents an optimized tamper detection and recovery method that provides high recovery quality, high tolerable tampering ratio (TTR) and optimized speed. The proposed method compresses each block of the image separately – instead of compressing the whole image – which eliminates the need to store the SPIHT stream in the watermark, and provides a larger space for RS parity information. The proposed method also optimizes the speed of RS encoder and decoder by minimizing the code symbol size. The RS code message is composed by taking one symbol at a time from each block, which leads to reducing the encoding time dramatically. The obtained experimental results show a competing recovery quality of the proposed method while having high TTR.