Multipurpose medical image watermarking for effective security solutions

Abstract

Digital medical images contain important information regarding patient’s health and very useful for diagnosis. Even a small change in medical images (especially in the region of interest (ROI)) can mislead the doctors/practitioners for deciding further treatment. Therefore, the protection of the images against intentional/unintentional tampering, forgery, filtering, compression and other common signal processing attacks are mandatory. This manuscript presents a multipurpose medical image watermarking scheme to offer copyright/ownership protection, tamper detection/localization (for ROI (region of interest) and different segments of RONI (region of non-interest)), and self-recovery of the ROI with 100% reversibility. Initially, the recovery information of the host image’s ROI is compressed using LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) algorithm. Afterwards, the robust watermark is embedded into the host image using a transform domain based embedding mechanism. Further, the 256-bit hash keys are generated using SHA-256 algorithm for the ROI and eight RONI regions (i.e. RONI-1 to RONI-8) of the robust watermarked image. The compressed recovery data and hash keys are combined and then embedded into the segmented RONI region of the robust watermarked image using an LSB replacement based fragile watermarking approach. Experimental results show high imperceptibility, high robustness, perfect tamper detection, significant tamper localization, and perfect recovery of the ROI (100% reversibility). The scheme doesn’t need original host or watermark information for the extraction process due to the blind nature. The relative analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing schemes.