Medical image watermarking with tamper detection and recovery using reversible watermarking with LSB modification and run length encoding (RLE) compression

Abstract

Medical images have been used as one of the objects to diagnose the patient. A digitally formatted medical image is easier to be stored and distributed but also easier to be modified for illegal purposes. Digital image watermarking offers a solution to protect digital medical images. By embedding fragile authentication watermark, the watermarking system can detect and localize the tampered area of medical images. Moreover, by embedding the feature extraction in the form of average intensities of the image, an original image can be recovered from the tampered image. This paper will study and test a watermarking scheme using LSB Modification to perform tamper detection and recovery in the ROI. To make this watermarking scheme reversible, RLE is used to embed the original LSBs in the RONI to get higher embedding capacity. The experimental results show that this watermarking system can detect and localize tamper with up to 100% accuracy and perform image recovery up to 100% recovery rate until 20% of tempered area in ROI.