A FRT - SVD Based Blind Medical Watermarking Technique for Telemedicine Applications

Abstract

In this article, a blind and robust medical image watermarking technique based on Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed. A host medical image is first transformed into 16 × 16 non-overlapping blocks and then ridgelet transform is applied on the individual blocks to obtain sets of ridgelet coefficients. SVD is then applied on these sets, to obtain the corresponding U, S and V matrix. The watermark information is embedded into the host medical image by modification of the value of the significant elements of U matrix. This proposed technique is tested on various types of medical images such as X-ray and CT scan. The simulation results revealed that this technique provides better imperceptibility, with an average PSNR being 42.95 dB for all test medical images. This technique also overcomes the limitation of the existing technique which is applicable on only the Region of Interest (ROI) of the medical image.