A novel technique for EPR hiding in medical images for telemedicine

Abstract

Medical image data hiding has strict constrains such as high imperceptibility, high capacity and high robustness. Achieving these three requirements simultaneously is difficult. Though some works are reported in the literature on data hiding, watermarking and steganography which are suitable for telemedicine applications, none performs better in all aspects. Electronic Patient Report (EPR) data hiding for telemedicine demands a blind and reversible method. This paper proposes a novel approach to blind reversible data hiding based on integer wavelet transform. Experimental results shows that this scheme outperforms the prior arts in terms of zero BER (Bit Error Rate), higher PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), and large EPR data embedding capacity with WPSNR (Weighted Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) around 53 dB, compared with the existing reversible data hiding schemes. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.