A Secure Medical Image Watermarking Technique for E-Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The rapid rise in the exchange of the medical information for remote/continuous diagnosis via internet using different software’s and digital gadgets has ensured better health monitoring. This exchange, however, has given rise to many security issues which may occur due to noise in communication channels, mishandling of devices or unauthorized tempering. Thus, there is need of ensuring privacy, data integrity and copyright protection in order to provide better technological efficiency. For securing medical content digital watermarking techniques have proved to provide better solutions. In this chapter an efficient watermarking technique is proposed for exchanging patient information in an e-healthcare system. A robust watermarking technique using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for embedding the secret logo in the transform domain coefficients is presented. The hybrid combination of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and SVD ensures very high robustness of the watermark and hence is suitable for copyright applications. The security has been ensured by encrypting the watermark before embedding by chaos encryption. The proposed technique has been analysed in presence of various signal processing/geometrical attacks and shows very high robustness of the watermark. The experimental results obtained prove the efficiency of the technique and as such can be used in e-healthcare.