Watermarking in biomedical signal processing

Abstract

Recently, by means of technological innovation in communication networks and information, it has assisted healthcare experts across the world to seek high-quality diagnosis as well as to communicate each other as second opinions via enabling extensive and faster access to the patients’ electronic medical records, such as medical images. Medical images are extremely precious owing to its importance in diagnosis, education, and research. Recently, telemedicine applications in telediagnoisis, teleconsulting, telesurgery, and remote medical education play an imperative role in the advancement of the healthcare industry. Nevertheless, medical images are endured security risk, such as images tampering to comprise false data which may direct to wrong diagnosis and treatment. Consequently, watermarking of medical images offers the compulsory control over the flow of medical information. It is the typically used data hiding technique in the biomedical information security domain and legal authentication. In the field of telemedicine, exchange of medical signals is a very common practice. The signals are transmitted through the web and the wireless unguided media. The security and the authenticity are the matter of concern due to the various attacks on the web. Any type of the signals vulnerability in the biomedical data is not acceptable for the sake of proper diagnosis. A watermark is used to prove the ownership of the exchanged data. The logos of the hospitals or medical centers and electronic patient’s report card can be added to the biomedical signals as a watermark to establish the property right. This work provides an extensive view about the existing research works in the field of watermarking techniques on different biomedical signals. It includes the design and evaluation parameters serving as a guideline in the watermarking schemes′ development and benchmarking. This work also provides the comparative study between different watermarking methods. It reviews several aspects about digital watermarking in the medical domain. Also, it presented the properties of watermarking and several applications of watermarking. Meanwhile, it discusses the requirements and challenges that the biomedical watermarking process face.