Fragile watermarking for copyright authentication and tamper detection of medical images using compressive sensing (CS) based encryption and contourlet domain processing

Abstract

With the rapid growth in communication and computing technologies, transmission of digital images and medical images over the Internet is on the rise. In such scenario, there is a special need to meet the security and privacy issues and challenges of an individual and Intellectual Property (IP) owners. It is highly important for an individual to keep his/her personal images against invalid manipulation by the impostors. Hence developments of authentication and tamper detection techniques are the need of the hour. In this paper, a new hybrid non-blind fragile watermarking technique is proposed for tamper detection of images and for securing the copyrights of sensitive images. A combination of Compressive Sensing (CS) theory, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) are employed to achieve security, high embedding capacity, and authenticity. In this technique, the requirements are achieved by inserting encrypted watermark in lower frequency contourlet coefficients of cover images. The experimental results prove that this proposed technique provides high security, high imperceptibility, authenticity and tamper detection of various common signal processing and geometrical attacks.