Watermarking patient data in encrypted medical images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method for watermarking medical images for data integrity which consists of image encryption, data embedding and image-recovery phases. Data embedding can be completely recovered from the watermarked image after the watermark has been extracted. In the proposed method, we utilize standard stream cipher for image encryption and selecting non-region of interest tile to embed patient data. We show that the lower bound of the PSNR (peak-signal-to-noise-ratio) values for medical images is about 48 dB. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can embed a large amount of data while keeping high visual quality of test images. © 2013 Indian Academy of Sciences.