A hybrid steganography and watermark algorithm for copyright protection by using multiple embedding approaches

Abstract

In this modern era, it has become much simpler to replicate, sell, and copy the copyright owners' works without their permission as a result of the expansion of digitalization, and it is difficult to identify such violations, posing a threat to the creators' and copyright owners' rights. For many years, the internet has been regarded as one of the most serious threats to copyright, and the content available has varying levels of copyright protection. On the internet, there are numerous copyrighted works, including e-books, movies, news, and so on. Therefore, by using watermarking and steganography techniques, these issues can be solved, which are based on the author's signature information or logo. This paper concluded that the techniques of discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), one-time pad (OTP), and playfair are highly effective when used together to watermark an image or embed a secret message, our lab results validate that our algorithm scheme is robust against several sets of attacks, where the algorithm was assessed by computation of many evaluation metrics such as mean square error (MSE), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).