Multilayered highly secure authentic watermarking mechanism for medical applications

Abstract

Telemedicine is a technology-based substitute for conventional health care facilities. It symbolizes the practice of medication via indirect means. The foremost requirement for such remote healthcare practices is the communication of highly sensitive data over insecure networks, which demands very high protection of different types of health-related information such as Electronic Patient Record (EPR) and Related Medical images. Consequently, there is a stern need to develop algorithms to secure all confidential information for overall well being. This paper is an effort to propose one multilayer protection mechanism, which not only secures the patient’s transcript but also protects associated medical Images. EPR is embedded in the original medical image resulting in a watermarked medical image, which is further hidden in the reference image. But these two relevant records are given multiple strata of security before concealing and exposed to the insecure channel. Compression and Quantum Encryption of EPR are done, which is then embed into LWT transformed Medical Image, followed by scrambling and compression of all the planes of a watermarked medical image before embedding in different bands of LWT (Lifting Wavelet Transform), transformed reference image. This stride of hiding image is mandatory because original and watermarked medical images are very similar, thus prone to attacks. In order to avoid this, an image steganography technique is used to change the watermarked medical image’s visual structure, which is also referred to as visually meaningful encryption, as popular encryption algorithms give noise-like textures that can attract attackers. For authentication on the accession of records, biometric-based detection along with hash algorithm is also incorporated. Overall results (implemented using MATLAB) show that the proposed mechanism provides a highly secure and authentic medical healthcare system.