Protection of medical images and patient related information in healthcare: Using an intelligent and reversible watermarking technique

Abstract

Rajarajan, M. (2017). Protection of medical images and patient related information in healthcare: Using an intelligent and reversible watermarking technique. Applied Soft Computing Journal, 51, pp. 1668-179. doi: 10.1016/j.asoc.2016.11.044 This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent AbstractThis work presents an intelligent technique based on reversible watermarking for protecting patient and medical related information. In the proposed technique 'IRW-Med', the concept of companding function is exploited for reducing embedding distortion, while Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) is used as an embedding domain for achieving reversibility. Histogram processing is employed to avoid underflow/overflow. In addition, the learning capabilities of Genetic Programming (GP) are exploited for intelligent wavelet coefficient selection. In this context, GP is used to evolve models that not only make an optimal tradeoff between imperceptibility and capacity of the watermark, but also exploit the wavelet coefficient hidden dependencies and information related to the type of sub band. The novelty of the proposed IRW-Med technique lies in its ability to generate a model that can find optimal wavelet coefficients for embedding, and also acts as a companding factor for watermark embedding. The proposed IRW-Med is thus able to embed watermark with low distortion, take out the hidden information, and also recovers the original image. The proposed IRW-Med technique is effective with respect to capacity and imperceptibility and effectiveness is demonstrated through experimental comparisons with existing techniques using standard images as well as a publically available medical image dataset.

A Robust Multi-Watermarking Algorithm for Medical Images Based on DTCWT-DCT and Henon Map

“…As the currently international compression standard, JPEG compression is widely used in watermarking [1,2,[7][8][9]. In the watermarking field, many scholars used JPEG attacks [8][9][10]13,14,18,19,21,22]. High-intensity JPEG compression may be applied to watermarking images.…”

Mejora de un esquema de marca de agua aplicado a la gestión de imágenes médicas

“…Durante los últimos años se han implementado técnicas basadas en marcas de agua, las cuales son aplicadas a imágenes médicas [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. En la presente sección se presentan los métodos más representativos los cuales aplican técnicas de marcado de agua en imágenes médicas.…”

“…En [7] se propone una técnica de marca de agua reversible basada en la Transformada de Wavelet Entera (IWT por sus siglas en inglés de Integer Wavelet Transform), este método logra incrustar marcas de agua con baja distorsión, adicionalmente utiliza programación genética (GP) para localizar los coeficientes Wavelet para inserción.…”

Chaos-based robust method of zero-watermarking for medical signals

“…Watermarking ensures the protection and authentication of the identity of a person that is embedded into the host audio. Although the use of watermarking in medical images has been extensively studied [26][27][28][29][30], no significant work has been reported for medical speech signals. Only a few studies have been conducted for privacy protection using medical speech signals.…”