Medical image watermarking for ownership & tamper detection

Abstract

Image watermarking can provide ownership identification as well as tamper protection. Transform domain based image watermarking has been proven to be more robust than the spatial domain watermarking against different signal processing attacks. On the other hand, tamper detection is found to be working well in spatial domain. In the proposed work, the focus is on the improvement of the medical image watermarking by incorporating the concept of multiple watermarking of the host image. The principal components (PC) based insertion make the scheme secured towards ownership attack. On the other hand, LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch) based fragile watermarking is used to hide compressed image’s ROI (region of interest) to tackle the intentional tampering attacks. The ROI based watermark generation provides the complete reversibility of the ROI. In this way, proposed scheme provides perfect reversibility of ROI, good imperceptibility in addition to satisfactory robustness. The tamper handing ability of proposed scheme is also tested against various attacks, which turns out to be quite good. The proposed scheme is found to be more useful, when compared with recently proposed schemes in term of features and usefulness.