Reversible Joint Blind Watermarking for Medical Images and Videos

Author Name(s): Kavitha K. J, Dr. B. Priestly Shan
Author Email: kavithakj219@gmail.com

Abstract

Digital Watermarking system is been practiced widely in the health care centers to secure the patient’s records. India is adapting the telemedicine technology to provide facility of easy access to the medical records by the patients and doctors. It makes easy for the doctors to diagnose the patient disease and in turn it saves the time and amount to be spent unnecessarily. With the avail of such facility, it is required to protect the Medical Health Records (MHR) by the respective health care centers being used by the frauds whose intention is to make illegal money. In this regard many measures are adopted by health care centers and one of them is the use of Digital watermarking (DWM). Digital watermarking is implemented in mainly two domains: one at the pixel level usually called as the spatial domain and the other is at the frequency level called as the frequency domain. Frequency domain techniques are more preferable as these techniques are more robust than the spatial methods. Discrete Wavelet Transform is one of the efficient frequency domain techniques and the other variation of this technique is Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT). In this paper LWT is mainly used for the decomposition purpose and the patient detail in Quick Response (QR) code form is used as the watermark to reduce the payload capacity.

Introduction

Diagnosing the patient’s diseases from a remote place has become easy now because of development in the health care systems which provide various ways of data transmissions like telemedicine, telemetry etc. As a result of such technologies the patient’s security becomes the major concern [4], and to achieve this, the digital watermarking technology plays a major role with the implantation of security or authentication measures.
Digital watermarking is a process of hiding or embedding some useful information in cover information. In this work, the cover information is medically scanned image such as ultra sound (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) etc and medically scanned ultra sound 2-D video. The patient details is taken as the watermark and converted to QR code. This conversion is done to reduce the data payload in terms of number of bits to be embedded in to the cover information so that there is no or less degradation of the cover information which is an essential requirement in the field of medicine to avoid unnecessary conflicts. The QR code is an easy way of representation of the data and also it results in high accuracy and consumes less space compared to other previous methods such as barcode [8]. Along with the use of QR code, a secret key is used to enhance the security [2] [3] at the watermark Embedder and decoder side.

Conclusion

In this paper a joint blind watermarking approach based on QR code [9] is proposed for providing the security, authentication of the medical scanning images and medical videos. The algorithm is implemented using the high frequency components which contains less information/details. The algorithm is implemented is using MATLAB 2015a. The maximum PSNR obtained is more than 90 db. And also MSE, NCC and NAE values are optimal. In future, we can improve the tolerance of the algorithm by developing some new encryption and QR code generation technologies and implementing the blind watermarking in the low frequency components to increase the robustness.

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