An SVD Values Ordering Scheme for Medical Image Watermarking

Abstract

In order to increase the security of medical image sharing and transfer, we present in this work a watermarking approach to protect medical images. This approach consists of inserting hospital signature information and patient data into the medical image. The goal of our work is to integrate the watermark with as little distortion as possible to retain the medical information in the image. In this approach DWT decomposition is applied to the image which allows a very fine adjustment during the insertion. An SVD is then applied to the three subbands LL, LH and HL, which allows storing the maximum energy of the image in a minimum of singular values. A combination of the three resulting singular value matrices is then performed for watermark integration. The proposed approach ensures data integrity, confidentiality when sharing data, and robustness to several conventional attacks.