A dual adaptive watermarking scheme in contourlet domain for DICOM images

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nowadays, medical imaging equipments produce digital form of medical images. In a modern health care environment, new systems such as PACS (picture archiving and communication systems), use the digital form of medical image too. The digital form of medical images has lots of advantages over its analog form such as ease in storage and transmission. Medical images in digital form must be stored in a secured environment to preserve patient privacy. It is also important to detect modifications on the image. These objectives are obtained by watermarking in medical image.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this paper, we present a dual and oblivious (blind) watermarking scheme in the contourlet domain. Because of importance of ROI (region of interest) in interpretation by medical doctors rather than RONI (region of non-interest), we propose an adaptive dual watermarking scheme with different embedding strength in ROI and RONI. We embed watermark bits in singular value vectors of the embedded blocks within lowpass subband in contourlet domain.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The values of PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) and SSIM (structural similarity measure) index of ROI for proposed DICOM (digital imaging and communications in medicine) images in this paper are respectively larger than 64 and 0.997. These values confirm that our algorithm has good transparency. Because of different embedding strength, BER (bit error rate) values of signature watermark are less than BER values of caption watermark. Our results show that watermarked images in contourlet domain have greater robustness against attacks than wavelet domain. In addition, the qualitative analysis of our method shows it has good invisibility.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed contourlet-based watermarking algorithm in this paper uses an automatically selection for ROI and embeds the watermark in the singular values of contourlet subbands that makes the algorithm more efficient, and robust against noise attacks than other transform domains. The embedded watermark bits can be extracted without the original image, the proposed method has high PSNR and SSIM, and the watermarked image has high transparency and can still conform to the DICOM format.</p

Digital watermarking : applicability for developing trust in medical imaging workflows state of the art review

Medical images can be intentionally or unintentionally manipulated both within the secure medical system environment and outside, as images are viewed, extracted and transmitted. Many organisations have invested heavily in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), which are intended to facilitate data security. However, it is common for images, and records, to be extracted from these for a wide range of accepted practices, such as external second opinion, transmission to another care provider, patient data request, etc. Therefore, confirming trust within medical imaging workflows has become essential. Digital watermarking has been recognised as a promising approach for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of medical images. Authenticity refers to the ability to identify the information origin and prove that the data relates to the right patient. Integrity means the capacity to ensure that the information has not been altered without authorisation. This paper presents a survey of medical images watermarking and offers an evident scene for concerned researchers by analysing the robustness and limitations of various existing approaches. This includes studying the security levels of medical images within PACS system, clarifying the requirements of medical images watermarking and defining the purposes of watermarking approaches when applied to medical images

Reversible Image Watermarking Using Modified Quadratic Difference Expansion and Hybrid Optimization Technique

With increasing copyright violation cases, watermarking of digital images is a very popular solution for securing online media content. Since some sensitive applications require image recovery after watermark extraction, reversible watermarking is widely preferred. This article introduces a Modified Quadratic Difference Expansion (MQDE) and fractal encryption-based reversible watermarking for securing the copyrights of images. First, fractal encryption is applied to watermarks using Tromino's L-shaped theorem to improve security. In addition, Cuckoo Search-Grey Wolf Optimization (CSGWO) is enforced on the cover image to optimize block allocation for inserting an encrypted watermark such that it greatly increases its invisibility. While the developed MQDE technique helps to improve coverage and visual quality, the novel data-driven distortion control unit ensures optimal performance. The suggested approach provides the highest level of protection when retrieving the secret image and original cover image without losing the essential information, apart from improving transparency and capacity without much tradeoff. The simulation results of this approach are superior to existing methods in terms of embedding capacity. With an average PSNR of 67 dB, the method shows good imperceptibility in comparison to other schemes

WG1N5315 - Response to Call for AIC evaluation methodologies and compression technologies for medical images: LAR Codec

This document presents the LAR image codec as a response to Call for AIC evaluation methodologies and compression technologies for medical images.This document describes the IETR response to the specific call for contributions of medical imaging technologies to be considered for AIC. The philosophy behind our coder is not to outperform JPEG2000 in compression; our goal is to propose an open source, royalty free, alternative image coder with integrated services. While keeping the compression performances in the same range as JPEG2000 but with lower complexity, our coder also provides services such as scalability, cryptography, data hiding, lossy to lossless compression, region of interest, free region representation and coding

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