An efficient reversible data embedding approach in medical images for health care management

Abstract

The use of images, text and video has become inevitable in today s rapidly advancing and growing digital world. It has been greatly assisted by the contributions of information technology in bringing about state of the art high speed and secure transmission and reception systems. Content transmission through e-mails, hard media like hard disk drives (HDD), compact discs (CD), digital video discs (DVD) etc., have made things simpler, safer and faster. Digital images can be captured easily with scanners, digital cameras and camcorders, and transmitted easily over the Internet. As a result, digital images appear widely in the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). However, this advance has also brought the problem such as copyright protection for content providers. Many unauthorized activities like illegal tampering of data, illegal broadcast monitoring, attacks in an attempt to destroy the underlying content are becoming more prevalent. Digital watermarking is one of the proposed solutions for copyright protection of multimedia. Data hiding is an age old technique used to hide data in an image. Considerable researches are going on in this area to protect the hidden data from unauthorized access. Apart from its normal applications, data hiding has had a new dimension since the introduction of tele based services like tele Medicine, tele diagnosis etc., which have introduced medical image processing to the arena of data hiding. With the advent of tele based services, numerous merits have been reported like cutting down of transportation time of patient to meet the doctor or hospital, cutting down of cost due to internet based newlinetransmission and reception and also efficient patient monitoring and treatment due to newlinesystematic and methodological secured storage of the patient information in the hospital s newlinedata base for future access.