In allusion to the problem that how to detect whether the digital image data is complete, and whether the image is tampered, an image authentication algorithm based on two-dimensional histogram shifting was proposed to improve the quality of the authentication image. Firstly, the two-dimensional histogram of the cover image was structured through two prediction difference value calculating methods. The embeddable channels were chosen by the preset parameters and the embeddable channel peak positions were determined and the embeddable channels were shifted. Then, the anthentication information was embedded into image blocks with histogram shifting method. Hierarchical tampering detection was adopted during the process of tamper detection to effectively improve the accuracy. The experimental results showed that the algorithm could resist noise attack, and the average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the authentication image was 52.37dB and 50.33dB respectively when the parameter was set as 2 and 4, which improves the quality of images. The resutls prove that the algorithm has high security, and it is able to implement reversible watermarking as well as precisely locationing the tampering region.