Wavelet based combinational approaches for efficient medical image watermarking

Abstract

The medical data transmission between various medical institutions spread across the globe has garnered more attention in latest years. Normally the medical information containing the medical image and the patient data are transmitted through the internet as per the standards proposed by Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM), which is however unsecure. This raises certain considerations like i) authentication, ii) integrity and iii) confidentiality which are of major concern. These issues can be resolved using digital image watermarking; it is a technique that embeds a watermark (secured information) to a host image also referred as cover image, the embedded image is transmitted through the internet to reach the destination where the actual watermark is extracted. The proposed application area is medical informatics, where security and imperceptibility play a key role in storing and transmitting of medical images such as Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and X-ray imaging. In this proposed work, three wavelet-based approaches, one blind and two non-blind watermarking schemes have been proposed to deliver the efficient watermarking algorithms for the medical images. Attempts were made to bring maximum tradeoff between the watermarking characteristics such as robustness, imperceptibility and security in the three proposed models. All the approaches are based on wavelet transformation techniques with a unique combination of other image processing tools. newline