Authentication and Data Hiding Using a Hybrid ROI-Based Watermarking Scheme for DICOM Images

Abstract

Authenticating medical images using watermarking techniques has become a very popular area of research, and some works in this area have been reported worldwide recently. Besides authentication, many data-hiding techniques have been proposed to conceal patient's data into medical images aiming to reduce the cost needed to store data and the time needed to transmit data when required. In this paper, we present a new hybrid watermarking scheme for DICOM images. In our scheme, two well-known techniques are combined to gain the advantages of both and fulfill the requirements of authentication and data hiding. The scheme divides the images into two parts, the region of interest (ROI) and the region of non-interest (RONI). Patient's data are embedded into ROI using a reversible technique based on difference expansion, while tamper detection and recovery data are embedded into RONI using a robust technique based on discrete wavelet transform. The experimental results show the ability of hiding patient's data with a very good visual quality, while ROI, the most important area for diagnosis, is retrieved exactly at the receiver side. The scheme also shows some robustness against certain levels of salt and pepper and cropping noise.

A Review of Medical Image Watermarking Requirements for Teleradiology

“…In contrast, separation of ROI and RONI in medical images is not straightforward and may require the interaction/approval of doctor/radiologist. In addition, making such separation is sometimes very difficult, although it is applied in several watermarking schemes [9,12,77]. Besides, developing reversible watermarking is promising for medical image application with taking no risk for sacrificing the diagnostic accuracy, although computational properties may incur additional complexity in different processing domains.…”

“…These requirements are being achieved by different conventional measures, which are thought to be incapable of providing the required security of the electronic radiology information in the PACS/RIS-based teleradiology [5][6][7]. On the other hand, recent studies show the possibility of using digital watermarking for improving security in teleradiology [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

A Heuristic Automatic and Robust ROI Detection Method for Medical Image Warermarking

“…For instance, in [27,28], reversible and non-reversible methods are used for embedding the watermark in ROI and RONI, respectively, and in [29,30], fragile and robust methods are used for embedding the watermark in ROI and RONI, respectively.…”

“…For example, in [14,16,18,20,22,25,[31][32][33][34], the ROI is manually assigned by defining a rectangle box around it, and in [15,17,21,27,28], the polygonal ROI is specified manually. In automatic ROI partitioning [19,23,24,26,29,30], there are some problems which will be highlighted later in this paper.…”

ROI-Based Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for Medical Images with Tamper Detection

“…AI-Qershi and Khoo proposed two ROI-based schemes. In Ref [14], a combination of DE technique and the modified DE technique was adopted. In Ref [15], the DE algorithm and the three-level DWT algorithm were combined.…”