An efficient watermarking technique using contourlet transform for medical images

Abstract

The purpose of digital image watermarking is to hide secret information, objects, or logos on some multimedia content to secure the information or attack. Unauthorized individuals may attempt to access data or images during data transmission for illicit purposes. By establishing a hospital logo or Electronic Health Record (EHR) into a source images, medical image watermarking secures the data contained in medical images. In this paper, we present a brand-new watermarking scheme for medical images using contourlet transform. Each subband's energy value is calculated, and the middle energy subband is taken into account for the embedding process. Four different types of digital image watermarking techniques are used to compare the performance of the proposed watermarking scheme. (I)DWT without Band selection (II) DWT - SVD (IIII) DWT with Bandselection (IV) Curvelet Transform Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), a performance metric, shows that the proposed method produces 52.63 percent of PSNR value for CT images and 53.98 percent of PSNR value for MRI images. When compared to other watermarking techniques, the contourlet transform provides better results, as evidenced by the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio.