Secure Watermarking Technique for Medical Images with Visual Evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid watermarking technique for medical images. The method uses a combination of three transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD). Then, the paper discusses the results of applying the combined method on different medical images from eight patients. The images were watermarked with a small watermark image representing the patients' medical data. The visual quality of the watermarked images (before and after attacks) was analyzed using five quality metrics: PSNR, WSNR, PSNR-HVS-M, PSNR-HVS, and MSSIM. The first four metrics' average values of the watermarked medical images before attacks were approximately 32 db, 35 db, 42 db, and 40 db respectively; while the MSSM index indicated a similarity between the original and watermarked images of more than 97%. However, the metric values decreased significantly after attacking the images with various operations even though the watermark image could be retrieved after almost all attacks. In brief, the initial results indicate that watermarking medical images with patients' data does not significantly affect their visual quality and they can still be used by medical staff.