Hybrid steganography and cryptography techniques for securing medical images

Abstract

Nowadays all medical equipments are producing digital photography of the patients for high level of accuracy to detect and diagnose the disease These digital photographs are stored in a personal computer at hospital premise and retrieved when the physician or medical doctors requires Hence the security of the patients such details are important and to be a confidential one In this work hybrid stegocrypto technique is proposed to increase the level of security in hospital or health care centers The widespread usage of ASCII art has been considered in this resaerch work In this regard color image is converted into an ASCII Art by using NMF Algorithm This art is stored as an Art image Inside this Art additional information such as data file and mobile no or email id for sending key is to be hidden Both Art image and hidden information are stored as stego image using 4bit LSB Algorithm This stego image is secured using Elliptic Curve Algorithm In order to restore the original art image from stego image the decryption key is required This decrypting key is sent to the email id or mobile number specified during the creation of stego image Image security plays a vital role in securing the medical images at hospitals It prevents to heal the data from attackers or hackers This research work proposes a simple and efficient technique for securing the medical images by applying the steganography and cryptography methodology on it Steganography embeds the secret medical image into cover image and then information entropy is measured If the information entropy is low discrete wavelet transform is applied on the stego image to determine the smooth regions Then cryptography algorithm is applied on the smooth regions in the stego image to increase the security The performance of the proposed system is analyzed in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio PSNR Mean Square Error MSE Number of Pixels Change Rate NPCR and Unified Average Changing Intensity UACI newline