Hybrid visual cryptography cum watermarking algorithm for copyright protection of images

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid blind algorithm for the copyright protection of colour images. The novelty in the presented approach consists in designing a hybrid visual cryptography cum discrete wavelet transform based digital colour image watermarking. The distortion caused by new algorithm is assessed by using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and similarity structure index measure (SSIM) and robustness against different types of attacks have been assessed using StirMark. The proposed hybrid algorithm provides better imperceptibility in harmony with the human visual system and offers higher robustness against signal processing attacks.