A medical image steganography method based on integer wavelet transform and overlapping edge detection

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the transmission of digital medical images for e-health services. However, existing implementations of this service do not pay much attention to the confidentiality and protection of patients’ information. In this paper, we present a new medical image steganography technique for protecting patients’ confidential information through the embedding of this information in the image itself while maintaining high quality of the image as well as high embedding capacity. This technique divides the cover image into two areas, the Region of Interest (ROI) and the Region of Non- Interest (RONI), by performing Otsu’s method and then encloses ROI pixels in a rectangular shape according to the binary pixel intensities. In order to improve the security, the Electronic Patient Records (EPR) is embedded in the high frequency sub-bands of the wavelet transform domain of the RONI pixels. An edge detection method is proposed using overlapping blocks to identify and classify the edge regions. Then, it embeds two secret bits into three coefficient bits by performing an XOR operation to minimize the difference between the cover and stego images. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides a good compromise between security, embedding capacity and visual quality of the stego images

LSB Based Steganography Model for Medical Images

This paper presents a steganographic model in medical system using LSB method. The LSB scheme takes the first LSB bit of the gray scale image and first message bit from the message matrix (Patient information) and embeds the message into the original image. After insertion of first message bit, pixel location of image and message is incremented by one. This process continuous itself till the message length is not equal to zero. Different medical images are taken for experimental result. Image is passed from one doctor to another after embedding their respective prescription in it. The experiment is performed on the seven medical images and the result is obtained

Enhancing information hiding and segmentation for medical images using novel steganography and clustering fusion techniques

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.In recent years, there has been rapid development in digital medical imaging. The continuous development of medical imaging is expected to make further contributions to healthcare systems, where the increased use of medical imaging in a variety of clinical settings has played an important role in improving health services. The main objective of the research presented in this thesis is to investigate digital image steganography and segmentation in order to offer a systematic way for designing and developing them, with a particular concentration on medical imaging security and magnetic resonance (MR) brain image segmentation

An Efficient Data Security System Using Reserve Room Approach on Digital Images for Secret Sharing

This paper presents enhancement of d ata protection system for secret communication through common network based on reversible data concealment in encrypted images with reserve room approach. In this paper was implemented for true color RGB image and reserve room approach under multi scale decomposition. The Blue plane will be chosen for hiding the secret text data. Then image is then separated into number of blocks locally and lifting wavelet will be used to detect approximation and detailed coefficients. Then approximation part is encrypted using chaos encryption method. The proposed encryption technique uses the key to encrypt an image and not only enhances the safety of secret carrier informa tion by making the information inaccessible to any intruder having a random method. After image encryption, the data hide r will conceal the secret data into the detailed coefficients which are reserved before encryption. Although encryption achieves certain security effects, they make the secret messages unreadable and unnatural or meaningless. This system is still enhanced with encrypt messages using a symmetric key method. This is the reason a new security approach called reversible data hiding arises. It is the art of hiding the existence of data in another transmission medium to achieve secret communication. The data hidi ng technique uses the adaptive LSB replacement algorithm for concealing the secret message bits into the encrypted image. In the data extraction module, the secret data will be extracted by using relevant key for choosing the encrypted pixe ls to extract th e data. By using the decryption keys, the image and extracted text data will be extracted from encryption to get the original informatio n. Finally the performance of this proposal in encryption and data hiding will be analyzed based on image and data recovery

Integration of biometrics and steganography: A comprehensive review

The use of an individual’s biometric characteristics to advance authentication and verification technology beyond the current dependence on passwords has been the subject of extensive research for some time. Since such physical characteristics cannot be hidden from the public eye, the security of digitised biometric data becomes paramount to avoid the risk of substitution or replay attacks. Biometric systems have readily embraced cryptography to encrypt the data extracted from the scanning of anatomical features. Significant amounts of research have also gone into the integration of biometrics with steganography to add a layer to the defence-in-depth security model, and this has the potential to augment both access control parameters and the secure transmission of sensitive biometric data. However, despite these efforts, the amalgamation of biometric and steganographic methods has failed to transition from the research lab into real-world applications. In light of this review of both academic and industry literature, we suggest that future research should focus on identifying an acceptable level steganographic embedding for biometric applications, securing exchange of steganography keys, identifying and address legal implications, and developing industry standards

Digital watermarking in medical images

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 05/12/2005.This thesis addresses authenticity and integrity of medical images using watermarking. Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Radiology Information Systems (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (P ACS) now form the information infrastructure for today's healthcare as these provide new ways to store, access and distribute medical data that also involve some security risk. Watermarking can be seen as an additional tool for security measures. As the medical tradition is very strict with the quality of biomedical images, the watermarking method must be reversible or if not, region of Interest (ROI) needs to be defined and left intact. Watermarking should also serve as an integrity control and should be able to authenticate the medical image. Three watermarking techniques were proposed. First, Strict Authentication Watermarking (SAW) embeds the digital signature of the image in the ROI and the image can be reverted back to its original value bit by bit if required. Second, Strict Authentication Watermarking with JPEG Compression (SAW-JPEG) uses the same principal as SAW, but is able to survive some degree of JPEG compression. Third, Authentication Watermarking with Tamper Detection and Recovery (AW-TDR) is able to localise tampering, whilst simultaneously reconstructing the original image