Secure transmission of medical images by watermarking technique

Abstract

The traffic of digital images is growing rapidly on computer networks. Protection of digital data, especially medical images, becomes important for many reasons such as confidentiality, authentication and integrity. Currently, the most suitable for the transfer of medical images lies in cryptography. However, once decrypted, the image is no longer protected and can be duplicated, copied, falsified and distributed easily. In this context, digital watermarking has quickly emerged as a new advanced technology to enhance the security of digital images. Indeed, the insertion of a watermark in a medical image can authenticate it and guarantee its integrity. The watermark must be generally hidden does not affect the quality of the medical image. The objective of this paper is to develop a watermarking algorithm, in the domain wavelet transform, to ensure an authentication service suitable for medical images to gray level fostering a fragile rather than robust of the watermark inserted. We examine the technique used for the description of the results obtained in terms of imperceptibility and robustness.