Secure watermarking scheme for color DICOM images in telemedicine applications

Abstract

Teleradiology plays a vital role in the medical field, which permits transmitting medical and imaging data over a communication network. It ensures data reliability and provides convenient communication for clinical interpretation and diagnostic purposes. The transmission of this medical data over a network raises the problems of legal, ethical issues, privacy, and copyright authenticity. The copyright protection of medical images is a significant issue in the medical field. Watermarking schemes are used to address these issues. A gray-level or binary image is used as a watermark frequently in color image watermarking schemes. In this paper, the authors propose a novel non-blind medical image watermarking scheme based on 2-D Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT), Multiresolution Singular Value Decomposition (MSVD), and LU factorization to improve the robustness and authenticity of medical images. In this scheme, multiple color watermarks are embedded into the colored DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) images obtained from Color Doppler images (DICOM format), and the average results achieved by our proposed scheme is 46.84 db for Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), 37.46 db for Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), 0.99 for Quality of Image and 0.998 for Normalized Correlation for various image processing attacks. These results make our watermarking technique an ideal candidate for medical image watermarking.