An improved reversible and secure patient data hiding algorithm for telemedicine applications

Abstract

In the telemedicine framework, a standout among the most significant issues is the exchange of electronic patient information (EPI) between patient and a doctor that are remotely connected. A minute change to EPI may result in a wrong diagnosis for the patient. To ensure secure and safe communication for telemedicine applications, an enhanced reversible data hiding method in the encrypted domain has been presented in this paper. All compared reversible data hiding methods have been seen to show predominant outcomes, yet just on natural images not on medical images because underflow problem may arise in medical images due to a large number of pixels have low-intensity values. Thus, an enhanced reversible data hiding method in the encrypted domain has been introduced here that gives a higher embedding rate than all the looked at reversible data hiding methods by embedding k, ( $$k\ge 1$$ ) binary bits of a secret message at every pixel of a cover image without any occurrence of underflow and overflow problem. The proposed method has not been suffering from underflow and overflow problem so that empowering it to embed and recover information precisely from low-intensity pixels too. This property makes our proposed method truly reasonable for its utilization on medical images. For all test images, the proposed method altogether beat all the compared methods in its ability to embed secret information and precisely recover it with maintaining the visual quality of stego images too.