Hybrid multiple watermarking technique for securing medical image using DWT-FWHT-SVD

Abstract

The telemedicine is a medical practice which consists in using new technologies of information and communication (NTIC). It makes it possible to facilitate the transfer and diagnosis of several medical data at distance. The security of medical images plays an important role to ensure and guarantee the integrity and confidentiality. This paper presents a robust multiple watermarking which combine discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). In our proposed method, we have inserted two watermark images into a single cover medical image. The original medical image is divided until the third level of DWT and then the selected high-frequency sub-bands (HH1 and HH3) are transformed by FWHT and SVD. The same steps are exerted on the first watermark image. Furthermore, the second watermark is divided until the first level and then transformed by SVD. The insertion of the two watermarks is made in the singular values of the original image. The experimental results approve that our contribution gives a better compromise invisibility-capacity-robustness compared with other reported techniques.