Medical Image Watermarking Technique Research Articles

Selection of Digital Watermarking Techniques for Medical Image Security by Using the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process

Background: The watermarking technique is a security algorithm for medical images and the patient's information. Watermarking is used for maintaining the robustness, integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and complexity of medical images. Objective: The selection of medical image watermarking technique is multi-criteria decision-making and an automatic way of algorithm selection for security and privacy. However, it is difficult to select a better watermarking technique through traditional selection techniques. Methods: To deal with this problem, a multicriteria-based fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) was proposed. This method is applied for algorithm selection for the security of medical images in healthcare. In this method, we first determined the list of criteria and alternatives, which directly affect the decision of the medical image security algorithm. Then, the proposed method was applied to the criteria and alternatives. Results: We provided the rank according to the obtained weights of the algorithm. Furthermore, the overall results and ranking of the algorithms were also presented in this article. Conclusion: Integrity was found to have the highest weight (0.509) compared to the other criteria. The weight of the other criteria, namely authentication, was 0.165, robustness was 0.151, confidentiality was 0.135, and complexity was 0.038. Thus, in terms of ranking, integrity was reported to be of the highest priority among the five criteria attributes.

Advances in medical image watermarking: a state of the art review.

Watermarking has been considered to be a potent and persuasive gizmo for its application in healthcare setups that work online, especially in the current COVID-19 scenario. The security and protection of medical image data from various manipulations that take place over the internet is a topic of concern that needs to be addressed. A detailed review of security and privacy protection using watermarking has been presented in this paper. Watermarking of medical images helps in the protection of image content, authentication of Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and integrity verification. At first, we discuss the various prerequisites of medical image watermarking systems, followed by the classification of Medical Image Watermarking Techniques (MIWT) that include state-of-the-art. We have classified MIWT's into four broader classes for providing better understanding of medical image watermarking. The existing schemes have been presented along with their cons so that the reader may be able to grasp the shortcomings of the technique in order to develop novel techniques proving the inevitability of the presented review. Further, various evaluation parameters along with potential challenges pertaining to medical image watermarking systems have been discussed to provide a deep insight into this research area.

Prospects of Digital Watermarking in Providing Security, Reliability, and Privacy to Medical Images

Telemedicine is one of the most eminent terms used in the modern e-healthcare system. Digital medical image reports, along with electronic patient records, play a central role in diagnosis from distance. These reports need to be transmitted over an open communication channel with immense security and reliability, so that appropriate diagnosis can be performed. Moreover, the privacy of the patient is required to be preserved. Digital watermarking is one of the most conventional and suitable practices to serve all of these purposes. New challenges appear in the domain of watermarking with the advancement of digital signal processing; consequently, researchers are endowing more efforts to overcome these challenges. In this paper, a survey on medical image watermarking has been done, and the performance of a few state-of-the-art medical image watermarking techniques is compared. This work makes the researchers and the developers familiar with the recent trends, challenges, and scopes in this domain to facilitate them in finding out adequate research directions.

Medical image watermarking technique using IWT-BSVD

Medical image watermarking technique using IWT-BSVD

Robust Watermarking Method for Secure Transmission of Medical Images in EHR Systems

Confidentiality of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and privacy are two important security requirements for healthcare systems. Many devices on the EHR network utilize little or no encryption, which makes data in transit vulnerable to exploitative attacks, such as Man-in-the-Middle and other filtration methods. Recently, watermarking algorithms as an efficient response to these requirements is in the underline. In this paper, we present a robust watermarking method conceived as part of an Electronic Health Record platform. In this method a chaotic encryption and blind medical image watermarking technique was incorporated into the system as an authorization mechanism to ensure confidentiality and integrity of electronic health information. We present a hybrid watermarking method based on a combination of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), hessenberg Decomposition (HD), Singular value decomposition (SVD) and an original chaos crypto system based on the Arnold Transform (AT) of Singular Value Decomposition. In order to spread the robustness of our algorithm and provide additional security, an improved SVD-AT embedding and extraction procedure has been used to scramble the EHR data in the preprocessing step of the proposed method. In the process of watermark embedding, an R-level discrete wavelet transform was applied to the host image. The low frequency wavelet coefficients are selected to carry this scrambled-watermark. In extraction process, the stored used plain image is obtained from the trusted authority server to complete the verification process. The receiver should compare the unsigned watermark with the extracted watermark again. The verification can be done before clinical procedures and diagnosis. The proposed watermarking method endures entirety attacks and rightly extracts the hidden watermark without significant degradation in the image quality, thus, when the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Correlation (NC) performance of the proposed algorithm is performed.

A ‘Divide and Embed’ approach in a robust crypto-watermarking technique for enhancing the embedding capacity

Medical Image watermarking techniques have a major concern of addressing the issue of embedding capacity as the electronic health record (EHR) of a patient is large in size. Embedding large size watermark into medical images degrades the perceptual quality of the image which may lead to changes in morphological features of the tissues or organs. The main aim of the proposed work is to address the challenge of the trade-off between embedding capacity and image quality along with maintaining robustness. A ‘Divide and Embed’ approach is proposed to enhance the embedding capacity without affecting the image perceptibility and robustness. This approach is based on the availability of multiple medical images with a single patient’s record. The patient information used as a watermark is divided into several parts equal to the number of medical images available with a patient record and embedded separately using a region-based crypto-watermarking technique with a wavelet-based hybrid embedding process. The projected technique is tested by varying embedding capacity to check for both imperceptibility and robustness against various unintentional and intentional attacks for both CT scan and MR Images. The PSNR achieved is 77.9 dB for the higher embedding capacity of 56,548 pixels by maintaining the robustness with average BER to 0.0609 and average NC to 0.9406 after applying various attacks. Therefore, the proposed approach has enhanced the embedding capacity by maintaining the perceptual quality of the medical image as well as robustness is also consistent as compared to the other researcher’s work.

An Enhanced Hybrid Watermarking Method and Imaging System for Securing Medical Images

Medical image processing typically deals with the exploration of several medical image datasets for attaining an effective solution in diagnosing the affected patients. Medical image of the patients are typically stored in digital form as Electronic patient’s record (EPR), which must be dealt with utmost security and confidentiality, as the patient’s data are linked with external open platforms for future diagnosis. Medical image watermarking and encryption schemes assist in meeting the above requirements in effectively securing the patient’s image data. The ultimate objective of this research inclines towards securing medical images so as to achieve maximum effectiveness over health related areas. In this paper, an enhanced hybrid medical image watermarking and equivalent encryption strategy is typically investigated for attaining an effective solution towards medical image processing. The proposed methodology works with the integration of image watermarking algorithm together with an encryption algorithm. Image watermarking is achieved by a system based on Redundant discrete wavelet transform and Singular value decomposition. Moreover, by utilizing the property of chaotic signals for improving the integrity, a hybrid medical image watermarking technique is proposed by upgrading the Arnold cat map (ACM) with Logistic map. For image encryption, Symmetric block encryption algorithm based on Feistel structure is proposed. The efficiency of the proposed strategy is estimated in terms of Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Mean square error (MSE) and Correlation coefficient (CC).

Review of medical image authentication techniques and their recent trends

There is always a need for an updated systematic review of a special subject area because of its importance for the researchers and the interested audience. This paper presents a review of medical image authentication (MIA) which is an interesting application of medical image watermarking techniques. The main objectives of medical image authentication techniques are protecting the medical images from tampering and verifying their integrity. Over the years many MIA schemes have been presented for different purposes such as detecting tampering in the medical images, localizing the tampered region, and recovering the tampered region. This paper starts by providing some basic information about the medical image watermarking techniques and their requirements, followed by a brief display for the previous review papers in this field which proves the necessity to present this review paper. Then, an overview of MIA process and its domain-based concepts are presented. Thereafter, the MIA schemes are classified according to their objectives and the domain of embedding the watermarks. The most used performance evaluation measures and metrics in the state-of-the-art are also reviewed in this paper followed by the conclusions and some recent trends of this interesting research field.

Medical image watermarking technique using IWT-BSVD

Medical image watermarking technique using IWT-BSVD

Robust medical image watermarking technique using integer wavelet transform and shearlet transform with BSVD

Robust medical image watermarking technique using integer wavelet transform and shearlet transform with BSVD

Retraction: An Efficient Deep Learning Approach for Brain Tumor Segmentation Using CNN (IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 981 022012)

This article has been retracted by IOP Publishing following an allegation that this article may contain tortured phrases [1]. IOP Publishing has investigated and agrees the article contains a number of nonsensical phrases that feature throughout the paper, masking overlap with previously published work [2-6], to the extent that the article makes very little sense. This casts serious doubt over the legitimacy of the article and/or expertise of the authors in this topic. IOP Publishing wishes to credit PubPeer Commenters [7] and the Problematic Paper Screener for bringing the issue to our attention. The authors agree to this retraction. [1] Cabanac G, Labbe C, Magazinov A, 2021, arXiv:2107.06751v1 [2] Karthik G.V.S, Fathima S.Y, Rahman M.Z.U, Ahamed S.R and Lay-Ekuakille A, 2013, Efficient Signal Conditioning Techniques for Brain Activity in Remote Health Monitoring Network, IEEE Sensors Journal. 13. 9 [3] Nayak S R, Mishra J and Palai G, 2018, An extended DBC approach using maximum Euclidian distance for fractal dimension of color images, Optik 166. 110-115 [4] Aparna P and Kishore P.V.V, 2018, An Efficient Medical Image Watermarking Technique in E-healthcare Application Using Hybridization of Compression and Cryptography Algorithm, Journal of Intelligent Systems. 27. 1 [5] Nithya S, Ajantha S , Mahapriya G, Mispa J, 2017, Measurement of Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation using Neural Network, IJERT, ICONNECT-2017 conference proceedings [6] Akshaya B, Nandhini J, Pauline Shilpa Ashwanthy J, Therasa M, 2016, Brain Tumor Segmentation Based on SFCM using Neural Network, IRJET 3 10 [7] https://pubpeer.com/publications/791A55B16A57C49057A542CA891EE9 Retraction published: 30 December 2022

DCT based reversible watermarking technique for Medical Images with improved quality of watermarked image

These days, it is extremely easy to duplicate and distribute digital media, and because of this the protection of intellectual property is a very important issue. In case of medical images, the patient’s information and details can be securely hidden in the cover image. But being a special case the used data hiding technique should be properly selected. Being Medical Images it is necessary to retrieve the exact medical image after removal of the watermark. In this paper a simple reversible watermarking technique based on DCT is implemented. After embedding watermark, it is necessary to maintain quality of the medical image. To improve the quality of the watermarked medical image, the blocks in which the watermark is embedded, is selected based on variance of the blocks. The algorithm is tested for various medical image modalities. Being a simple algorithm it is fast and efficient.

A Secured and Robust Medical Image Watermarking Approach for Protecting Integrity of Medical Images

AbstractIn this paper, a novel medical image watermarking (MIW) technique for tele ‐ medicine applications is proposed. In this approach homomorphic transform (HT), redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) transforms are successfully utilized for developing an effective watermarking technique. Reflectance component of medical host image is obtained using HT, on which RDWT decomposition and SVD are applied. Similarly medical watermark image is processed with RDWT and SVD. Singular values (Svs) were used for embedding the watermark image into host image. 2‐D chaotic Arnold transform (AT) is used for providing extra security to the watermark image by encrypting the watermarked image. Moreover, proposed technique is also tested for several wavelet families. Robustness and imperceptibility of the proposed technique is enhanced as depicted in experimental results under various attacks. Furthermore, better robustness is attained from proposed technique on comparing it with other formerly reported schemes.

Prediction-Based Reversible Watermarking of CT Scan Images for Content Authentication and Copyright Protection

In the application of teleradiology, radiologists located at different geographical locations around the globe, exchange Computed Tomography (CT) scan images along with relevant patient information for diagnosis as well as therapeutic measures. However, when these images are exchanged over public networks like the Internet, two important issues are created: content authentication and copyright protection. In this paper, a novel high capacity reversible watermarking scheme for CT Scan images is presented which is based on the region of interest (ROI) and region of non-interest (RONI) watermarking. The scheme embeds and extracts the secret data into the input CT scan image as well as restores the image to its pristine state at the receiving end. After segmenting the host image into the ROI and RONI regions, the scheme implants a fragile watermark (FW) into the ROI to check the integrity of the ROI and a robust watermark (RW) into the RONI for copyright protection. The novelty of the proposed system is in two fold. First, it takes advantage of the segmentation algorithm to avoid the additional overhead of information about the vertices usually required at the receiving end in order to select the ROI. Secondly, it takes advantage of the prediction-based reversible watermarking to avoid additional overhead of location map, which is usually required for reversibility in most of the reversible medical image watermarking techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms medical image watermarking techniques recently reported in the literature in terms of embedding capacity and imperceptibility of watermarked image.

Medical image watermarking technique based on polynomial decomposition

To date, the exchange and storage of medical data on electronic format are subject to potential risks. Hence, considerations of security and copyright protection of medical images are necessary and unavoidable. In such a situation, a watermarking scheme is proposed as one of the most promising methods to provide security, reliability, and authenticity of medical information. In this work, we propose a new region based medical image watermarking, which consists of embedding numerical information, called a watermark, into the original image. The main originality of this scheme is the use of the polynomial transform to decompose an image into two parts: the structure and the texture components. This mathematical model is used to extract the most relevant embedding areas, containing less information required for diagnosis. The texture component is selected for embedding the watermark so as to preserve fidelity to the original medical image. Compared with the state-of-the-art schemes, experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme can achieve a good compromise with regard to the invisibility and robustness of the watermark.

IWT-MDE based reversible thermal image watermarking enhanced with secret sharing mechanism

Telemedicine systems are used to transfer medical images between hospitals and doctors for consultation in many countries recently. It is crucial to ensure integrity of medical images transferred on unencrypted channels. Many medical image watermarking techniques have been proposed in the literature to deal with this problem. Thermal imaging to detect dense vascular regions is a new medical imaging modality gaining popularity to enhance diagnosis of breast cancer. Thermal images with large smooth areas and Region of Interest (ROI) have different characteristics compared to traditional medical images and require new image watermarking methods. A new thermal image watermarking algorithm utilizing Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), Modified Difference Expansion (MDE) and Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS) has been proposed for e-healthcare applications in this paper. IWT coefficients of thermal image are expanded by the MDE to make more consecutive blocks expandable. Location Map (LM) becomes more compressible if there are many consecutive blocks. Thus, larger ROI can be watermarked by the proposed method. The method also uses SSSS to share LM into meaningless shares embedded into border regions. Sharing LM by the SSSS makes it possible to reconstruct it even if some of the thermal image borders are removed inadvertently or modified on purpose to break the watermark. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method has better embedding capacity and good imperceptibility compared to similar methods reported in the literature. Besides, it has expanded ROI size and also is the first method which considers border region attacks in medical image watermarking.

A FRT - SVD Based Blind Medical Watermarking Technique for Telemedicine Applications

In this article, a blind and robust medical image watermarking technique based on Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed. A host medical image is first transformed into 16 × 16 non-overlapping blocks and then ridgelet transform is applied on the individual blocks to obtain sets of ridgelet coefficients. SVD is then applied on these sets, to obtain the corresponding U, S and V matrix. The watermark information is embedded into the host medical image by modification of the value of the significant elements of U matrix. This proposed technique is tested on various types of medical images such as X-ray and CT scan. The simulation results revealed that this technique provides better imperceptibility, with an average PSNR being 42.95 dB for all test medical images. This technique also overcomes the limitation of the existing technique which is applicable on only the Region of Interest (ROI) of the medical image.

A Novel Visual Medical Image Encryption for Secure Transmission of Authenticated Watermarked Medical Images

Secure medical data transmission is the important criteria in tele-medicine. It is helpful for getting the exact medical information at the remote specialist’s side from the local doctor. The medical image watermarking technique is used for secure medical data transmission. Electronic patient record (EPR) is embedded within the original medical image to produce the watermarked medical image for protecting the patient information. The watermarked medical image visually looks like the original medical image. Hence the attacker visually knows the medical image transmission and easily attacks the system. To avoid this situation, image encryption technique is used to change the visual structure of the watermarked medical image. Normal image encryption gives the noise-like or texture-like unknown image format which indicates an existence of some secret information as the encrypted image. To overcome this problem, this paper proposed a visual medical image encryption technique to protect the existence of the watermarked medical image. And to ensure the source authentication, a biometric based authentication is also proposed. The watermarked medical image is encrypted using the proposed visually meaning full image encryption along with the fingerprint image. Experimental results prove that the proposed method yields good results and mitigate the attacker challenges.

Biometric‐based efficient medical image watermarking in E‐healthcare application

Information hiding is particularly used for security applications to protect the secret message from an unauthorised person. Due to the tremendous development of the Internet and its usage, the issue of protection over the internet is increasing. Under such a condition, transforming the information from the transmitter to the receiver requires more security. Accordingly, in my previous research, an efficient medical image watermarking technique in E-healthcare application using a combination of compression and cryptography algorithm was proposed. The system only gives confidentiality and reliability. To overcome the problem, the authors propose a biometric-based on an efficient medical image watermarking in E-healthcare application, which produces a system for authentication, confidentiality, and reliability of the system. The proposed system utilises the fingerprint biometric for authentication, cryptography process for confidentiality, and reversible watermarking for the integrity. Basically, the proposed system consists of two stages such as (i) watermark embedding process and (ii) watermark extraction process. The experiments were carried out on the different medical images with electronic health record and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is analysed with the help of peak signal-to-noise ratio and normalised correlation.

Medical Image(s) Watermarking and its Optimization using Genetic Programming

In this paper, an medical image watermarking technique has been proposed, where intelligence has been incorporated into the encoding and decoding structure. The motion vectors of the medical image sequence are used for embedding the watermark. Instead of a manual selection of the candidate motion vectors, a generalized approach is used to select the most suitable motion vectors for embedding the watermark. Genetic programming (GP) module has been employed to develop a function in accordance with imperceptibility and watermarking capacity. Employment of intelligence in the system improves its imperceptibility, capacity, and resistance toward different attacks that can occur during communication and storing. The motion vectors are generated by applying a block-based motion estimation algorithm. In this work, Full-Search method has been used for its better performance as compared to the other methods. Experimental results show marked improvement in capacity and visual similarity as compared to the conventional approaches.