The invention relates to a human visual characteristic compressive sensing-based grayscale image tampering and detection method, which comprises the following steps of: (1) generation and transmission of a watermark of an image: prior to the transmission of the image, a sending terminal firstly generates a Hash value of the image by using a human visual characteristic compressive sensing-based sparse base change and measurement matrix, then, transmits the Hash value through a secure channel, and transmits the image to a receiving terminal through a public channel; (2) image detection of the receiving terminal: the receiving terminal verifies whether the image obtained from the public channel is tampered or not by using the watermark of the image received from a trusted channel; and (3) tamper localization of the receiving terminal: after the condition that the received image is maliciously tampered is judged by the receiving terminal, a compressive sensing orthogonal matching pursuit reconstruction method is further used for restoring a difference value D, and therefore, an image E of a tampered position is obtained. Compared with the prior art, the human visual characteristic compressive sensing-based grayscale image tampering and detection method has the advantages of high rate in detection, low quantity in transmission, fastness in computation and the like.