A Robust NIfTI Image Authentication Framework Based on DST and Multi-Scale Otsu Thresholding

Abstract

Telemedicine has been intensely promoted in the present pandemic situation of COVID-19 to maintain a strategic distance from the infected person. Several medical tests were used to detect the coronavirus, including antigen, RT-PCR, and a lung CT scan. Only a lung CT-Scan can detect the coronavirus and provide information about the lung infection. As a result, digital imaging plays a critical role in the current pandemic situation. Teleradiology allows for the communication of digital medical images of patients over the internet for diagnosis. A lung CT-Scan test is currently being performed on billions of people to detect COVID-19. These images were sent via the internet for diagnosis and research purposes. The NIfTI image file (.nii extension) was created by the CT-Scanner and contains multiple slices of the lungs. As a result, radiologists determine that the received image has not been tempered during transmission, posing a critical authenticity problem when transmitting these images over the internet. As a result, the researchers are more concerned about the integrity and authenticity of these images in teleradiology. This paper proposes a blind, robust watermarking scheme for lung CT-Scan NIfTI images to address this issue. We use Otsu’s image segmentation algorithm in the proposed scheme to identify the slice with the least amount of medical information for watermark embedding. The proposed scheme employs the Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST), Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT), and Schur decomposition to embed the encrypted watermark. Watermarks are encrypted using the Affine Transform. The experimental results show that watermarked slice has been tainted by the addition of various sorts of noise, including salt-and-pepper noise, compression, Gaussian noise, speckle noise, and motion blur. After an attack, a watermark is retrieved, and the NC values of extracted watermarks are 0.99623 for Salt and pepper noise, 0.96964 for Gaussian noise, 0.99014 for Speckle noise. The proposed scheme was put to the test with a variety of attacks and produced significant results.