Two-Bit Embedding Histogram-Prediction-Error Based Reversible Data Hiding for Medical Images with Smooth Area

Abstract

During medical treatment, personal privacy is involved and must be protected. Healthcare institutions have to keep medical images or health information secret unless they have permission from the data owner to disclose them. Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a technique that embeds metadata into an image and can be recovered without any distortion after the hidden data have been extracted. This work aims to develop a fully reversible two-bit embedding RDH algorithm with a large hiding capacity for medical images. Medical images can be partitioned into regions of interest (ROI) and regions of noninterest (RONI). ROI is informative with semantic meanings essential for clinical applications and diagnosis and cannot tolerate subtle changes. Therefore, we utilize histogram shifting and prediction error to embed metadata into RONI. In addition, our embedding algorithm minimizes the side effect to ROI as much as possible. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we benchmarked three types of medical images in DICOM format, namely X-ray photography (X-ray), computer tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Experimental results show that most of the hidden data have been embedded in RONI, and the performance achieves high capacity and leaves less visible distortion to ROIs.

A Review of the Asymmetric Numeral System and Its Applications to Digital Images

“…Except for their being valuable and essential for the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases, their more and more widespread distribution makes developing security mechanisms to guarantee their confidentiality, integrity, and traceability in an autonomous way becomes a must. Facing such a demand, researchers proposed Reversible Watermarking (RW) [39,40] schemes for images of sensitive content, e.g., medical images, such that any modification may aspect their interpretation. However, extra data (the watermark) must be embedded in the protection target, which usually increases the file size.…”

“…becomes a must. Facing such a demand, researchers proposed Reversible Watermark (RW) [39,40] schemes for images of sensitive content, e.g., medical images, such that a modification may aspect their interpretation. However, extra data (the watermark) m be embedded in the protection target, which usually increases the file size.…”

Multilayer Reversible Information Hiding with Prediction-Error Expansion and Dynamic Threshold Analysis

“…The word "reversible" in this context indicates that one can remove the embedded data to restore the original image. In recent years, numerous principles of the reversible information hiding technology were proposed, such as the difference expansion method [3][4][5][6], histogram method [7][8][9][10][11], difference of the pixel value method [12][13][14], the least significant bit method (LSB) [15,16], dual-image-based schemes [17,18], other reversible information hiding schemes [19][20][21][22][23][24][25], and the predictionerror method [26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. A good information hiding theory provides a significant capacity for embedded secret data that cannot be detected [1,33,34].…”