A Fragile ROI-Based Medical Image Watermarking Technique with Tamper Detection and Recovery

Abstract

In telemedicine it is a common practice to exchange medical images between hospitals located at distant places through unsecure networks like internet. During this transfer tampers may be introduced intentionally or unintentionally into medical images. In this circumstances authentication and integrity of medical images using watermarking has become a very popular area of research. In this paper we are proposing a Region of Interest (ROI) and Least Significant Bit (LSB) based fragile watermarking technique for tamper detection and recovery of medical images. At first, medical image is divided into ROI and RONI. Later, authentication information is inserted into ROI and recovery information into RONI. To increase embedding capacity in ROI, authentication information is compressed using Run Length Encoding (RLE) technique before inserting into ROI. Experimental results reveal that any tampering to ROI of medical image is identified and recovered without any loss.