Watermarking medical images with patient identification to verify authenticity

Abstract

In medical imaging, it has been shown that watermarking can improve data protection and content enrichment. In this work, we present an adaptive watermarking algorithm which exploits a wavelets-based human visual system (HVS) and a fuzzy inference system (FIS) to embed digital watermark while modifying frequency coefficients in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. The main goal of the algorithm is to provide a more robust and imperceptible watermark. The application should be capable of handling the trade-off between those two. This trade-off is met when the position of embedding the watermark is optimally selected. In this paper, the FIS and HVS are combined to control and generate the watermark weighting function to embed the imperceptible watermark. Based on the experimental results, it is shown that the implemented watermarking algorithm is imperceptible and robust to some normal attacks such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, Gaussian blur, median filtering and rotation.