MIWET: Medical image watermarking using encryption and fusion technique

Abstract

Digital augmentation of contemporary healthcare has directed the expansion of ICT-based systems. At this stage, a variety of telemedical support has been implemented to ensure the provision of medical utilities. Data Privacy, reliability, and credibility are the three security prerequisites that demand constant monitoring and corrective measures. Watermarking and cryptographic techniques offer a potentially viable solution for effectively addressing the aforementioned challenges. This article presents a robust and secure watermarking procedure that effectively safeguards the privacy and accuracy of digital medical data. This work uses a hybridization of NSST and DTCWT to implement a multimodality image fusion method that generates the watermark image. Further, a combination of three transforms namely, NSST, BEMD, and MSVD is used to conceal the generated mark in the carrier image. Also, the weighting factor is computed using HOG-based optimization to achieve a balance between visual quality and robustness. Finally, the marked carrier image is encrypted with a suitable encryption technique for better security. The proposed framework’s versatility, embedding capacity, robustness, and imperceptibility are evaluated, with the results justifying its efficacy. The study demonstrates a significant improvement of 47.65 % over the baseline, thus highlighting the framework’s superiority.