A robust watermarking algorithm for medical images

Abstract

Integrated healthcare systems require the transmission of medical images between medical centres. The presence of watermarks in such images has become important for patient privacy protection. However, some important issues should be considered while watermarking an image. Among these issues, the watermark should be robust against attacks and does not affect the quality of the image. In this paper, a watermarking approach employing a robust dynamic secret code is proposed. This approach is to process every pixel of the digital image and not only the pixels of the regions of non-interest at the same time it preserves the image details. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using several performance measures such as the Mean Square Error (MSE), the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), the Universal Image Quality Index (UIQI) and the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The proposed approach has been tested and shown robustness in detecting the intentional attacks that change image, specifically the most important diagnostic information.