Hiding clinical information in medical images: A new high capacity and reversible data hiding technique

Abstract

A new high capacity and reversible data hiding scheme for e-healthcare applications has been presented in this paper. Pixel to Block (PTB) conversion technique has been used as an effective and computationally efficient alternative to interpolation for the cover image generation to ensure reversibility of medical images. A fragile watermark and Block Checksum (computed for each 4×4 block) have been embedded in the cover image for facilitating tamper detection and tamper localization, and hence content authentication at receiver. The EPR, watermark data and checksum data has been embedded using Intermediate Significant Bit Substitution (ISBS) to avoid commonly used LSB removal/replacement attack. Non-linear dynamics of chaos have been put to use for encrypting the Electronic Patient Record (EPR)/clinical data and watermark data for improving the security of data embedded. The scheme has been evaluated for perceptual imperceptibility and tamper detection capability by subjecting it to various image processing and geometric attacks. Experimental results reveal that the proposed system besides being completely reversible is capable of providing high quality watermarked images for fairly high payload. Further, it has been observed that the proposed technique is able to detect and localise the tamper. A comparison of the observed results with that of some state-of-art schemes show that our scheme performs better.