Robust and Secure Multiple Watermarking for Medical Images

Abstract

This paper presents a robust and secure region of interest and non-region of interest based watermarking method for medical images. The proposed method applies the combination of discrete wavelet transform and discrete cosine transforms on the cover medical image for the embedding of image and electronic patient records (EPR) watermark simultaneously. The embedding of multiple watermarks at the same time provides extra level of security and important for the patient identity verification purpose. Further, security of the image and EPR watermarks is enhancing by using message-digest (MD5) hash algorithm and Rivest–Shamir–Adleman respectively before embedding into the medical cover image. In addition, Hamming error correction code is applying on the encrypted EPR watermark to enhance the robustness and reduce the possibility bit error rates which may result into wrong diagnosis in medical environments. The robustness of the method is also extensively examined for known attacks such as salt & pepper, Gaussian, speckle, JPEG compression, filtering, histogram equalization. The method is found to be robust for hidden watermark at acceptable quality of the watermarked image. Therefore, the hybrid method is suitable for avoidance of the patient identity theft/alteration/modification and secure medical document dissemination over the open channel for medical applications.