A Multi-Stage Security Solution for Medical Color Images in Healthcare Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a robust multi-stage security solution based on fusion, encryption, and watermarking processes to transmit color healthcare images, efficiently. The presented solution depends on the features of discrete cosine transform (DCT), lifting wavelet transform (LWT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). The primary objective of this proposed solution is to ensure robustness for the color medical watermarked images against transmission attacks. During watermark embedding, the host color medical image is transformed into four sub-bands by employing three stages of LWT. The resulting low-frequency sub-band is then transformed by employing three stages of DCT followed by SVD operation. Furthermore, a fusion process is used for combining different watermarks into a single watermark image. This single fused image is then ciphered using Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) encryption to strengthen the security. Then, the DNA-ciphered fused watermark is embedded in the host medical image by applying the suggested watermarking technique to obtain the watermarked image. The main contribution of this work is embedding multiple watermarks to prevent identity theft. In the presence of different multimedia attacks, several simulation tests on different color medical images have been performed. The results prove that the proposed security solution achieves a decent imperceptibility quality with high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values and high correlation between the extracted and original watermark images. Moreover, the watermark image extraction process succeeds in achieving high efficiency in the presence of attacks compared with related works.