Fragile and blind watermarking technique based on Weber's law for medical image authentication

Abstract

In developing countries such as India, transmission of medical images over the network is essential for providing health services to rural/remote population. During this transmission, a small distortion in the medical image may lead to wrong conclusions. Thus, arises the need to embed some authentication information in medical images to authenticate transmitted image. In this study, a blind and fragile watermarking technique based on Weber's law is proposed. Here, fragile watermark is inserted by quantising intensity of selected pixels in a medical image. As the proposed technique is fragile, it detects even a small change made to watermarked image and locates blocks where distortion has been made. Besides being able to detect all malicious changes that affect the quality of watermarked image, it is tolerant to image compression, which is essential to transmit images over the network. The proposed technique is highly imperceptible as the watermark is inserted by modifying intensity of dark pixels selected using Weber's law. An extension of the proposed technique is also given to enhance its capacity. Experimental results on standard medical image database prove the efficacy of the proposed method over existing works.

New Watermarking/Encryption Method for Medical Imaging FULL Protection in m-Health

“…Table 3 shows the comparaison of the proposed method and others method in term of availability, reliability, and confidentiality. therefore, the proposed is more secured than [6] and [16]- [20]. …”

“…Ali Al-Haj et al [19] where the authors have proposed an encryption algorithm for secured medical image transmission. Ekta Walia et al [20] where the authors have proposed a fragile and blind watermarking technique. Bouslimi et al [6] where the authors have proposed a joint encryption/watermarking system.…”

“… G. Coatrieux et al [18]  Ali Al-Haj et al [19]  Ekta Walia et al [20]  Bouslimi et al [6]   Proposed    …”

Robust watermarking scheme and tamper detection based on threshold versus intensity

“…However, semi-fragile watermarking techniques aim to prove the integrity and authenticity of the data content, It can accept the non-malicious modification and the watermark will be destroyed against malicious attacks, it called soft authenticate [7]. The fragile watermarking approaches called hard authenticate, which does not allow for any modification even for slight non-malicious modification and the watermark will be destroyed [8].…”

Image adaptive DCT- SVD based digital watermarking scheme by human visual characteristics

“…Also, the algorithm attaches only binary watermark images and it became computationally inefficient, since it used vector quantization algorithm for the optimization of adaptive quantization parameters, while indexing the blocks. Many other algorithms (Bhosale et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2012;Coatrieux et al, 2012;Ishikawa et al, 2012;Kandpal et al, 2012;Vargas et al, 2013;Varghese et al, 2014;Walia et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2005;Yang et al, 2010;Zareian et al, 2013) also developed in the literature by meeting some requirements of watermarking, but these algorithms also failed in simultaneously meeting other vital requirements of watermarking (Mason et al, 2000) including perceptibility, robustness, orthogonality, protection against attacks etc.…”