Fusion of Watermarking and Steganography for Protecting Image Ownership

Abstract

The use of digital images has become very common because of the rapid increase of the internet over time. Moving digital images over the internet is easy, but keeping ownership is complex, and serious issues have emerged. Forgery, fraud, and pirating of this content are rising. Different techniques used to protect images, like watermarking and steganography, but these methods are not enough toprotect. So, providing new techniques is essential for protecting image ownership. We have proposed a fusion method of steganography and watermarking in this work. First, the secret message is encoded within the original image using the LSB technique to obtain the stego image. Secondly, the watermarking process is applied on the stego image using text watermarking or image watermarking to provide stego-watermarked-image. The proposed fusion watermarking and steganography method is very useful for protecting image ownership over insecure communication channels. An attacker cannot get the desired watermarked image from the stego-watermarked-image without knowing the secret message hiding inside it using the LSB technique. The proposed method is efficient, simple and secure; it provides significant protection for image ownership.