ECH3OA: An Enhanced Chimp-Harris Hawks Optimization Algorithm for copyright protection in Color Images using watermarking techniques

This paper proposes a hybrid Enhanced Chimp-Harris Hawks Optimization Algorithm (ECH3OA) that combines both enhanced Chimp Optimization algorithm (ChOA) and Harris Hawks optimization algorithm (HHO). HHO is a robust algorithm in solving optimization issues. However, it suffers from a balancing problem between exploitation and exploration. On the other hand, ChOA algorithm is another powerful algorithm with the capability of balancing between exploitation and exploration. However, ChOA suffers from low convergence and falling in the local minimum. The novelty of ECH3OA as a proposed optimization algorithm is concentrated in three contributions. The first is an enhanced ChOA that uses Levy Flight to improve its exploration phase. The second contribution of the algorithm is proposing an updated formula to calculate escaping energy of the prey as a selector between exploitation and exploration. Finally, the four cases of exploitation using HHO are used in the proposed algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is proved by comparing its performance with other eleven state-of-the-art algorithms on 23 standard benchmark function, 30 benchmark function of different modalities from CEC2017, 10 complex functions from CEC2019, and six standard real world engineering problems. Friedman average rank and Wilcoxon rank-sum (p-value) tests are applied as non-parametric statistical tests. Among the different benchmark suits, ECH3OA is ranked first among the other algorithms. We also applied ECH3OA for copyright protection in Color Images using Crypto-Watermarking Techniques. The results show better durability and transparency level of the watermark as compared to recent studies.