Multiple Image Watermarking for Efficient Storage and Transmission of Medical Images

Abstract

In today’s digital era, managing patient’s records can be one of the most challenging task for hospitals and health care centers. In hospitals, patient’s medical data like medical reports and images (like x-ray, CT and MRI) etc. are stored at different locations at server side that results in more memory utilization. Also, Medical applications like telemedicine require exchange of medical data between two health care centers that needs huge transmission bandwidth. As a result, the use of watermarking in medical applications would prove to be advantageous as multiple images can be hidden into a single image. Multiple image watermarking system is proposed in this paper which thereby can result in efficient memory and bandwidth utilization. The algorithm simultaneously embeds three different medical images as multiple watermarks into all the three color planes (Red, Green and Blue planes) of cover image there by reducing the memory for compact storage and bandwidth requirement during transmission thereby retaining the quality of images. For maintaining the confidentiality as well as security, Arnold’s scrambling method is used for encrypting the watermarks. The Performance indicators used for measuring the quality of watermarked image are peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and correlation coefficient.