Open Access

ARTICLE

Local Features-Based Watermarking for Image Security in Social Media

by Shady Y. El-mashad¹, Amani M. Yassen¹, Abdulwahab K. Alsammak¹, Basem M. Elhalawany^2,*

1 Department of Computer Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at Shoubra, Benha University, Egypt
2 Department of Communications and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at Shoubra, Benha University, Egypt

* Corresponding Author: Basem M. Elhalawany. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 69(3), 3857-3870. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.018660

Received 16 March 2021; Accepted 21 April 2021; Issue published 24 August 2021

Abstract

The last decade shows an explosion of using social media, which raises several challenges related to the security of personal files including images. These challenges include modifying, illegal copying, identity fraud, copyright protection and ownership of images. Traditional digital watermarking techniques embed digital information inside another digital information without affecting the visual quality for security purposes. In this paper, we propose a hybrid digital watermarking and image processing approach to improve the image security level. Specifically, variants of the widely used Least-Significant Bit (LSB) watermarking technique are merged with a blob detection algorithm to embed information into the boundary pixels of the largest blob of a digital image. The proposed algorithms are tested using several experiments and techniques, which are followed by uploading the watermarked images into a social media site to evaluate the probability of extracting the embedding watermarks. The results show that the proposed approaches outperform the traditional LSB algorithm in terms of time, evaluation criteria and the percentage of pixels that have changed.

---

Keywords

---