High Capacity and Secure Electronic Patient Record (EPR) Embedding in Color Images for IoT Driven Healthcare Systems

Abstract

In this chapter a very high capacity and secure medical image information embedding scheme capable of hiding Electronic Patient Record (EPR imperceptibly in color medical images for an IoT driven healthcare setup has been proposed. A fragile watermark has been embedded besides the EPR to make the proposed scheme capable of detecting any tampering of EPR during transit. At the receiving end, firstly we extract the fragile watermark, if it is same as one embedded, signalling that EPR has not been attacked during transit, EPR is extracted otherwise system uses a retransmission request instead of wasting time to extract the compromised EPR. For ensuring security of the EPR we hide it pseudo-randomly in cover medium. Two address vectors have been used to embed the EPR pseudo-randomly in host image planes and hence secure the information. Further hiding is carried out in spatial domain and hence is computationally efficient. Given the merits of our technique with regard to payload, imperceptibility, security, computational efficiency and ability to authenticate EPR at the receiver it can be used for real time medical information exchange like in case of Internet of things (IoT) driven healthcare and health monitoring systems for effective transfer of medical data during transit. A detailed experimentation carried out and the results obtained prove that our technique is proficient in hiding very high Payload EPR imperceptibly. We have further tested our scheme to several attacks like noise addition, filtering and rotation etc. Experimental investigations show that our scheme effectively detects the tamper caused by any of the mentioned attacks.