Reversible fragile medical image watermarking with zero distortion

Abstract

The modern telemedicine often lacks in the infrastructure to deploy image security standards. The fragile watermarking scheme provides good security solution to medical images in telemedicine. In this paper, we present a reversible (distortion free), fragile, spatial domain watermarking scheme for medical images. The medical image authenticity and security can be achieved by two modes of watermarking operations. In the first mode, the watermark (fingerprint) is embedded into host image and later, for copyright justification the watermark (fingerprint) is extracted from host image. In the second mode of the operation the watermark (fingerprint) is extracted from unaltered components of the image ie. stored as the key. Later, this key information is used for recovering the watermark. The proposed scheme uses the second mode of operation which extracts the watermark from the unaltered pixel components of image. The extracted watermark is used for copy-right justification. As medical images have zero tolerance for noise our scheme produces noise free watermarked medical images. The scheme is robust to different types of attacks. The fragility and robustness of the scheme is analyzed considering different types of image processing attacks.