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Information hiding in medical images: a robust medical image watermarking system for E-healthcare

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Abstract

Electronic transmission of the medical images is one of the primary requirements in a typical Electronic-Healthcare (E-Healthcare) system. However this transmission could be liable to hackers who may modify the whole medical image or only a part of it during transit. To guarantee the integrity of a medical image, digital watermarking is being used. This paper presents two different watermarking algorithms for medical images in transform domain. In first technique, a digital watermark and Electronic Patients Record (EPR) have been embedded in both regions; Region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI). In second technique, Region of Interest (ROI) is kept untouched for tele-diagnosis purpose and Region of Non-Interest (RONI) is used to hide the digital watermark and EPR. In either algorithm 8 × 8 block based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) has been used. In each 8 × 8 block two DCT coefficients are selected and their magnitudes are compared for embedding the watermark/EPR. The selected coefficients are modified by using a threshold for embedding bit a ‘0’ or bit ‘1’ of the watermark/EPR. The proposed techniques have been found robust not only to singular attacks but also to hybrid attacks. Comparison results viz-a - viz payload and robustness show that the proposed techniques perform better than some existing state of art techniques. As such the proposed algorithms could be useful for e-healthcare systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Instrumentation Technology, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K, India, 190006

    Shabir A. Parah, Javaid A. Sheikh, Farhana Ahad, Nazir A. Loan & G. M. Bhat

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  1. Shabir A. Parah
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  2. Javaid A. Sheikh
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  3. Farhana Ahad
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  4. Nazir A. Loan
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  5. G. M. Bhat
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Correspondence to Shabir A. Parah.

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Parah, S.A., Sheikh, J.A., Ahad, F. et al. Information hiding in medical images: a robust medical image watermarking system for E-healthcare. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 10599–10633 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3127-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3127-y

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