Robust and Secured Reversible Data Hiding Approach for Medical Image Transmission over Smart Healthcare Environment

Abstract

With the rapid progress of cloud computing, there has been a marked improvement in the development of smart healthcare applications such as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Telemedicine, etc. Cloud-based healthcare systems can efficiently store and communicate patient electronic healthcare records (EHR) while allowing for quick growth and flexibility. Despite the potential benefits, identity violation, copyright infringement, illegal re-distribution, and unauthorized access have all been significant. To address all these breaches, in this paper, a reversible medical image watermarking scheme using interpolation is proposed. The medical image is partitioned into Border Region (BR), Region of Interest (ROI), and Region of Non-interest (RONI) regions. BR is used for embedding integrity checksum code generated from ROI for tamper detection. RONI is used for embedding watermark. To ensure complete recovery of ROI and high embedding capacity, ROI is compressed before embedding. To ensure high-security compressed ROI, hospital emblem and EHR merged and then encrypted using a random key generated from Polybius magic square to get higher security. The proposed scheme is proved to take less computational time as there are no complex functions used in the embedding. The experiments performed on the proposed scheme is proved to have high imperceptibility, robustness, embedding capacity, security, and less computational time. All these confirm that the proposed approach is a potential candidate for suitable in smart healthcare environment.