A study on medical data hiding using wireless capsule endoscopy

Abstract

Recently wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been designed to monitor and collect patient’s vital parameters continuously and send them to the remote healthcare center or hospital. It is very important to protect the confidential data while transferring them. Different steganography techniques have been proposed for that. In a wavelet-based steganography, ECG signals were used to hide the patient’s confidential data and there is system degradation and it is not suitable to see the smoothness along the contours of the image. Here, contourlet transform is proposed, where image can be used as a host medium to improve the system performance. It combines encryption and scrambling technique to protect patient’s confidential data. The proposed method allows images to efficiently hide the patient’s confidential data and other physiological information. Typically, patient’s biological signals and other physiological readings are collected using sensors. The host image can be obtained from the technique called wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE). Capsule endoscopy is a way to record images of the digestive tract which is used in medical field. The capsule looks like a pill and contains a tiny camera. After a patient swallows the capsule, it takes pictures of the inside of the gastrointestinal tract. Encryption of patient’s confidential data prevents an unauthorized person who does not have the shared key from accessing patient’s confidential data. Therefore, the proposed contourlet technique guarantees secure medical data transfer.