QR code based steganography and cryptography techniques

Abstract

The use of the e health application is mounting every day in this modern era One important instance of e health applications is remote patient monitoring A significant proportion of people around the world suffer from heart disease and therefore continuous cardiac monitoring for a wide range of patients is extremely important Diagnosing cardiac disease at the precise time can save many lives On the other hand continuous patient monitoring systems have been unable to achieve this objective because of the lack of technology in the field of e Health application ECG signals are acquired using a remote wearable body sensor and physiological information such as age sex temperature and blood pressure then is used in the fast diagnostic processes by health care providers Additionally three major issues which prevent remote diagnostic processes are imperceptibility robustness and privacy This work focuses on addressing these issues such as imperceptibility robustness and privacy through the use of data hiding techniques namely steganography and cryptography to provide efficient data protection facilities The thesis proposes an ECG steganography based on the QR code in which patient confidential information is converted into a 2D binary matrix and used as watermark data The conversion process ensures additional patient information security The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed using the following metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio PSNR Percentage Residual Difference PRD and Bit Error Rate BER The work has also produced promising results in terms of security robustness and imperceptibility with a difference of less than 1 between original ECG signal and stego ECG signal Thus the resulting ECG signal signals can still be used for the diagnosing process newline