Abstract
This work presents a robust watermarking technique in hybrid domain for the copyright claim of medical images. The scheme is a fusion of three popular transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The input image is first separated into region of interest (ROI) and region of non-interest (RONI). The DWT is applied on RONI to get low and high frequency bands. The low frequency band is then segmented into 4×4 blocks. The Human Visual System (HVS) is applied to select the potential blocks for implanting watermark content. Each 4×4 selected block is further subdivided into four 2×2 carrier matrices. The SVD is applied to each carrier matrix. Finally, the hidden information is implanted by altering the largest diagonal singular values of four 2×2 matrices. The technique is blind, so host image is not needed for the extraction of hidden information. The proposed scheme achieves higher values of imperceptibility as well as robustness. Experimental results reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the techniques currently reported in the literature by achieving higher values of imperceptibility in the form of PSNR with value of 44.0567 decibels (dB) and SSIM value of 0.9800. At the same time it achieves excellent values of robustness with maximum NCC value of 1.000 and minimum BER with value of 0.000.
Highlights
Nowadays, medical practitioners usually exchange medical images of patients produced from different modalities in digital form over public networks like Internet
Various methods of hiding information such as digital image watermarking, cryptography, steganography are in common practice to resolve the issues of copyright and secrecy of medical images and patients‟ diagnostic as well as personal information
The information related to region of interest (ROI) is implanted in region of non-interest (RONI) for authentication and recovery of watermark information
Summary
Medical practitioners usually exchange medical images of patients produced from different modalities in digital form over public networks like Internet. Due to the development of current computer technologies, people can store, duplicate and distribute information over the Internet [2] This has resulted in increase of both intentional and unintentional attacks on copyrighted digitized data. Recent studies [3, 4] reveal that unauthorized use of medical data is increasing on daily basis This mishandling of medical information can raise copyright and privacy issues when it is exchanged from one geographical region to another over the Internet [5]. Various methods of hiding information such as digital image watermarking, cryptography, steganography are in common practice to resolve the issues of copyright and secrecy of medical images and patients‟ diagnostic as well as personal information. The technique is proposed for the following reasons: (1) To get high imperceptibility of watermarked image. (2) To provide copyright protection of medical images. (3) To maintain the security of patients‟ information
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