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

The Most Common Characteristics of Fragile Video Watermarking: A Review

The progress of network and multimedia technologies has been phenomenal during the previous two decades. Unauthorized users will be able to copy, retransmit, modify reproduction, and upload the contents more easily as a result of this innovation. Malicious attackers are quite concerned about the development and widespread use of digital video. Digital watermarking technology gives solutions to the aforementioned problems. Watermarking methods can alleviate these issues by embedding a secret watermark in the original host data, allowing the genuine user or file owner to identify any manipulation. In this study, lots of papers have been analyzed and studied carefully, in the period 2011–2022. The historical basis of the subject should not be forgotten so studying old research will give a clear idea of the topic. To aid future researchers in this subject, we give a review of fragile watermarking approaches and some related papers presented in recent years. This paper presents a comparison of many relevant works in this field based on some of the outcomes and improvements gained in these studies, which focuses on the common characteristics that increase the effect of watermarking techniques such as invisibility, tamper detection, recovery, and security &nbsp

Robust watermarking for magnetic resonance images with automatic region of interest detection

Medical image watermarking requires special considerations compared to ordinary watermarking methods. The first issue is the detection of an important area of the image called the Region of Interest (ROI) prior to starting the watermarking process. Most existing ROI detection procedures use manual-based methods, while in automated methods the robustness against intentional or unintentional attacks has not been considered extensively. The second issue is the robustness of the embedded watermark against different attacks. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this thesis addresses these issues of having automatic ROI detection for magnetic resonance images that are robust against attacks particularly the salt and pepper noise and designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density salt and pepper noise. In the ROI detection part, combinations of several algorithms such as morphological reconstruction, adaptive thresholding and labelling are utilized. The noise-filtering algorithm and window size correction block are then introduced for further enhancement. The performance of the proposed ROI detection is evaluated by computing the Comparative Accuracy (CA). In the watermarking part, a combination of spatial method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used to increase the robustness against salt and pepper noise. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER). Based on experiments, the CA under eight different attacks (speckle noise, average filter, median filter, Wiener filter, Gaussian filter, sharpening filter, motion, and salt and pepper noise) is between 97.8% and 100%. The CA under different densities of salt and pepper noise (10%-90%) is in the range of 75.13% to 98.99%. In the watermarking part, the performance of the proposed method under different densities of salt and pepper noise measured by total PSNR, ROI PSNR, total SSIM and ROI SSIM has improved in the ranges of 3.48-23.03 (dB), 3.5-23.05 (dB), 0-0.4620 and 0-0.5335 to 21.75-42.08 (dB), 20.55-40.83 (dB), 0.5775-0.8874 and 0.4104-0.9742 respectively. In addition, the BER is reduced to the range of 0.02% to 41.7%. To conclude, the proposed method has managed to significantly improve the performance of existing medical image watermarking methods

Image forgery detection using textural features and deep learning

La croissance exponentielle et les progrès de la technologie ont rendu très pratique le partage de données visuelles, d'images et de données vidéo par le biais d’une vaste prépondérance de platesformes disponibles. Avec le développement rapide des technologies Internet et multimédia, l’efficacité de la gestion et du stockage, la rapidité de transmission et de partage, l'analyse en temps réel et le traitement des ressources multimédias numériques sont progressivement devenus un élément indispensable du travail et de la vie de nombreuses personnes. Sans aucun doute, une telle croissance technologique a rendu le forgeage de données visuelles relativement facile et réaliste sans laisser de traces évidentes. L'abus de ces données falsifiées peut tromper le public et répandre la désinformation parmi les masses. Compte tenu des faits mentionnés ci-dessus, la criminalistique des images doit être utilisée pour authentifier et maintenir l'intégrité des données visuelles. Pour cela, nous proposons une technique de détection passive de falsification d'images basée sur les incohérences de texture et de bruit introduites dans une image du fait de l'opération de falsification. De plus, le réseau de détection de falsification d'images (IFD-Net) proposé utilise une architecture basée sur un réseau de neurones à convolution (CNN) pour classer les images comme falsifiées ou vierges. Les motifs résiduels de texture et de bruit sont extraits des images à l'aide du motif binaire local (LBP) et du modèle Noiseprint. Les images classées comme forgées sont ensuite utilisées pour mener des expériences afin d'analyser les difficultés de localisation des pièces forgées dans ces images à l'aide de différents modèles de segmentation d'apprentissage en profondeur. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que l'IFD-Net fonctionne comme les autres méthodes de détection de falsification d'images sur l'ensemble de données CASIA v2.0. Les résultats discutent également des raisons des difficultés de segmentation des régions forgées dans les images du jeu de données CASIA v2.0.The exponential growth and advancement of technology have made it quite convenient for people to share visual data, imagery, and video data through a vast preponderance of available platforms. With the rapid development of Internet and multimedia technologies, performing efficient storage and management, fast transmission and sharing, real-time analysis, and processing of digital media resources has gradually become an indispensable part of many people’s work and life. Undoubtedly such technological growth has made forging visual data relatively easy and realistic without leaving any obvious visual clues. Abuse of such tampered data can deceive the public and spread misinformation amongst the masses. Considering the facts mentioned above, image forensics must be used to authenticate and maintain the integrity of visual data. For this purpose, we propose a passive image forgery detection technique based on textural and noise inconsistencies introduced in an image because of the tampering operation. Moreover, the proposed Image Forgery Detection Network (IFD-Net) uses a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based architecture to classify the images as forged or pristine. The textural and noise residual patterns are extracted from the images using Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and the Noiseprint model. The images classified as forged are then utilized to conduct experiments to analyze the difficulties in localizing the forged parts in these images using different deep learning segmentation models. Experimental results show that both the IFD-Net perform like other image forgery detection methods on the CASIA v2.0 dataset. The results also discuss the reasons behind the difficulties in segmenting the forged regions in the images of the CASIA v2.0 dataset

A Novel Fragile Zero-Watermarking Algorithm for Digital Medical Images

The wireless transmission of patients’ particulars and medical data to a specialised centre after an initial screening at a remote health facility may cause potential threats to patients’ data privacy and integrity. Although watermarking can be used to rectify such risks, it should not degrade the medical data, because any change in the data characteristics may lead to a false diagnosis. Hence, zero watermarking can be helpful in these circumstances. At the same time, the transmitted data must create a warning in case of tampering or a malicious attack. Thus, watermarking should be fragile in nature. Consequently, a novel hybrid approach using fragile zero watermarking is proposed in this study. Visual cryptography and chaotic randomness are major components of the proposed algorithm to avoid any breach of information through an illegitimate attempt. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using two datasets: the Digital Database for Screening Mammography and the Mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society database. In addition, a breast cancer detection system using a convolutional neural network is implemented to analyse the diagnosis in case of a malicious attack and after watermark insertion. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is reliable for privacy protection and data authentication

Detecting Manipulations in Video

This chapter presents the techniques researched and developed within InVID for the forensic analysis of videos, and the detection and localization of forgeries within User-Generated Videos (UGVs). Following an overview of state-of-the-art video tampering detection techniques, we observed that the bulk of current research is mainly dedicated to frame-based tampering analysis or encoding-based inconsistency characterization. We built upon this existing research, by designing forensics filters aimed to highlight any traces left behind by video tampering, with a focus on identifying disruptions in the temporal aspects of a video. As for many other data analysis domains, deep neural networks show very promising results in tampering detection as well. Thus, following the development of a number of analysis filters aimed to help human users in highlighting inconsistencies in video content, we proceeded to develop a deep learning approach aimed to analyze the outputs of these forensics filters and automatically detect tampered videos. In this chapter, we present our survey of the state of the art with respect to its relevance to the goals of InVID, the forensics filters we developed and their potential role in localizing video forgeries, as well as our deep learning approach for automatic tampering detection. We present experimental results on benchmark and real-world data, and analyze the results. We observe that the proposed method yields promising results compared to the state of the art, especially with respect to the algorithm’s ability to generalize to unknown data taken from the real world. We conclude with the research directions that our work in InVID has opened for the future

Video copy-move forgery detection scheme based on displacement paths

Sophisticated digital video editing tools has made it easier to tamper real videos and create perceptually indistinguishable fake ones. Even worse, some post-processing effects, which include object insertion and deletion in order to mimic or hide a specific event in the video frames, are also prevalent. Many attempts have been made to detect such as video copy-move forgery to date; however, the accuracy rates are still inadequate and rooms for improvement are wide-open and its effectiveness is confined to the detection of frame tampering and not localization of the tampered regions. Thus, a new detection scheme was developed to detect forgery and improve accuracy. The scheme involves seven main steps. First, it converts the red, green and blue (RGB) video into greyscale frames and treats them as images. Second, it partitions each frame into non-overlapping blocks of sized 8x8 pixels each. Third, for each two successive frames (S2F), it tracks every block’s duplicate using the proposed two-tier detection technique involving Diamond search and Slantlet transform to locate the duplicated blocks. Fourth, for each pair of the duplicated blocks of the S2F, it calculates a displacement using optical flow concept. Fifth, based on the displacement values and empirically calculated threshold, the scheme detects existence of any deleted objects found in the frames. Once completed, it then extracts the moving object using the same threshold-based approach. Sixth, a frame-by-frame displacement tracking is performed to trace the object movement and find a displacement path of the moving object. The process is repeated for another group of frames to find the next displacement path of the second moving object until all the frames are exhausted. Finally, the displacement paths are compared between each other using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) matching algorithm to detect the cloning object. If any pair of the displacement paths are perfectly matched then a clone is found. To validate the process, a series of experiments based on datasets from Surrey University Library for Forensic Analysis (SULFA) and Video Tampering Dataset (VTD) were performed to gauge the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results of the detection scheme were very encouraging with an accuracy rate of 96.86%, which markedly outperformed the state-of-the-art methods by as much as 3.14%