A medical image steganography method based on integer wavelet transform and overlapping edge detection

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increased interest in the transmission of digital medical images for e-health services. However, existing implementations of this service do not pay much attention to the confidentiality and protection of patients’ information. In this paper, we present a new medical image steganography technique for protecting patients’ confidential information through the embedding of this information in the image itself while maintaining high quality of the image as well as high embedding capacity. This technique divides the cover image into two areas, the Region of Interest (ROI) and the Region of Non- Interest (RONI), by performing Otsu’s method and then encloses ROI pixels in a rectangular shape according to the binary pixel intensities. In order to improve the security, the Electronic Patient Records (EPR) is embedded in the high frequency sub-bands of the wavelet transform domain of the RONI pixels. An edge detection method is proposed using overlapping blocks to identify and classify the edge regions. Then, it embeds two secret bits into three coefficient bits by performing an XOR operation to minimize the difference between the cover and stego images. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides a good compromise between security, embedding capacity and visual quality of the stego images.