A ROBUST FRAMEWORK FOR COPYWRIGHT PROTECTION AND OWNERSHIP VERIFICATION OF DIGITAL IMAGES

Abstract: The widespread sharing of digital images through websites and social media has made unauthorized copying, redistribution, and manipulation easier. These issues create difficulties for photographers, designers, content creators, and organizations seeking to establish ownership of their work. This paper presents a robust framework for copyright protection and ownership verification of digital images using digital watermarking and cryptographic hashing. The proposed system is designed to register an image with creator metadata, embed copyright information as a watermark, generate a SHA-256 hash, and store the related ownership record for later verification. During verification, the submitted image is checked against stored records; a hash mismatch indicates that the file differs from the registered version, while watermark extraction can provide an additional ownership check when supported by the implemented watermarking method. The framework is planned around Python and image- processing libraries, with a database for ownership metadata. The design aims to combine image-level copyright marking with cryptographic integrity checking. Quantitative performance and robustness must be established through implementation and testing; this paper therefore does not claim unmeasured accuracy or performance results.

Keywords: Digital image copyright, digital watermarking, SHA-256, cryptographic hashing, ownership verification, image integrity, Python.