Reversible Watermarking for Protecting Patient’s Data Privacy Using an EPR-Generated QR Code

Abstract

As a result of the modern communication technology and the transmission of medical images from one place to another, watermarking has become urgent to protect copyright, authentication and integrity of medical images and patient’s information. This paper proposes a solution to the authentication and integrity problems by proposing a fragile reversible watermarking scheme. The proposed scheme generates a Quick Response (QR) code from the patient’s data and uses it as a watermark hidden in the medical image. The proposed scheme resulted in an average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 51.25 dB for a payload of one bit per pixel (1 bpp), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.99 and Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.488 indicating that the watermarked images obtained are of high visual quality.