Integer Wavelet Transform-Based ECG Steganography for Hiding Patients’ Confidential Information in e-Healthcare Systems

Abstract

A novel ECG steganography technique to hide patients’ confidential information using integer wavelet transform (IWT) is proposed. Modified least significant bit (m-LSB) method has been applied to embed the secret bits into the transform coefficients of an ECG signal. To strengthen the security of the embedded information, chaotic maps are employed which randomly select the ECG coefficients to embed the secret information. The formulated approach outperformed the other state-of-the-art techniques with high embedding capacity (EC) and excellent peak signal-to-noise Ratio (PSNR) at minimal percentage residual difference (PRD) and Kullback–Leibler divergence (KL-divergence). The proficiency of the proposed technique is also evaluated in terms of the clinical diagnostic distortion measures like wavelet-based weighted PRD (WWPRD) and wavelet energy-based diagnostic distortion (WEDD). The proposed method is competent to hide the confidential information while keeping the diagnostic features intact.