Blind and Robust Watermarking Scheme in Hybrid Domain for Copyright Protection of Medical Images

Abstract

This work presents a robust watermarking technique in hybrid domain for the copyright claim of medical images. The scheme is a fusion of three popular transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The input image is first separated into region of interest (ROI) and region of non-interest (RONI). The DWT is applied on RONI to get low and high frequency bands. The low frequency band is then segmented into 4  4 blocks. The Human Visual System (HVS) is applied to select the potential blocks for implanting watermark content. Each 4  4 selected block is further subdivided into four 2  2 carrier matrices. The SVD is applied to each carrier matrix. Finally, the hidden information is implanted by altering the largest diagonal singular values of four 2  2 matrices. The technique is blind, so host image is not needed for the extraction of hidden information. The proposed scheme achieves higher values of imperceptibility as well as robustness. Experimental results reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the techniques currently reported in the literature by achieving higher values of imperceptibility in the form of PSNR with value of 44.0567 decibels (dB) and SSIM value of 0.9800. At the same time it achieves excellent values of robustness with maximum NCC value of 1.000 and minimum BER with value of 0.000.

Security of medical images for telemedicine: a systematic review

“…Alzahrani et al [ 14 ] proposed a robust watermarking technique to protect medical image copyright in a hybrid domain. The proposed scheme is a hybrid of three algorithms, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).…”

Efficient Hybrid Blind Watermarking in DWT‐DCT‐SVD with Dual Biometric Features for Images

“…Images are compressed in compression, and SVD with the highest energy packing property is typically used. As previously established, SVD divides a matrix into orthogonal parts so that the best subrank approximations can be made [6,7]. Truncated SVD transformation with rank r offers significant storage savings over storing the entire matrix with acceptable quality.…”

An Improved Hybrid DCT-DWT Blind Watermarking Technique for Securing Multimedia Images

“…Internet technology has developed so much that a large amount of multimedia data is being transferred over the internet. Copyright protection is needed for transferring multimedia data over internet [2]. All kinds of data for example, video, image audio and documents could be transferred by people through internet network.…”

“…This is termed as a host or cover where the embedded host signal's visual quality should not be lowered. For more effectiveness, extraction and detection of watermark needs to tested against a finite number of alterations and attacks that meets certain characteristics such as robustness, integrity & security [3] [4].…”

“…The quality of the original host image and the image obtained after watermarking must be closer. There are recurrent signal processing and attacks for example, additive noise, filtering, cropping and modification of pixel values which must be resisted by the watermarks [2]. The watermark inward the image must be such that it is very difficult to be found and damaged by the intruders which is the main purpose of the watermarking method.…”