Medical signal steganography using curvelet Transform

Abstract

Steganography is the mechanism of protecting secret data which is sent through the common communication medium. Point of Care (PoC) system is used in most of the hospitals and health care centres. PoC system, it produces patient’s physiological readings like sugar level, pressure level, and medical signals like EEG, ECG and EMG etc. In order to consult with the doctors/experts those who are in some other locations, patient data and medical signals are to be sent to them. Medical steganography is the application of steganography for protecting medical data. In this work, a curvelet based medical steganography is implemented for one dimensional (1D) Medical signal like ECG, EMG and EEG. The results proved that, the curvelet based approach is best suited for 1D medical signal. We evaluate the performance of curvelet based approach using the metrics PSNR, MSE and payload. We obtained 35.89 % of average PSNR value for ECG signals, 21.47 % of average PSNR value for EMG signals and 22.57 % of average PSNR value for EEG signals. Keywords: Medical signal processing; ECG; EMG; EEG; Steganography; Encryption; Curvelet; Watermarking.