Abstract
Purpose
Watermarking is one of the techniques used to protect multimedia data, and images in particular, from malicious attacks by inserting a signature into these images. However, traditional watermarking schemes encounter limitations for sensitive images such as medical images.
Methods
In this work, a robust and blind watermarking approach is proposed to secure medical images exchanged in telemedicine. Marking medical images allows precise authentication of the patient and avoids confusing scans and thus avoiding diagnostic errors that can have serious consequences. In this approach, the frequency content of the image is acquired using three different transforms. Schur decomposition is then applied to the low-frequency sub-bands. Finally, the obtained upper triangular matrix values are modifier to integrate the watermark bits.
Result and conclusion
Imperceptibility and robustness experimental results show that the proposed methods adequately maintain a significant quality of watermarked images and are remarkably robust against several conventional attacks. Indeed, the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) obtained is 44.90 dB which proves that the integration process generates few distortions to the original image. For the robustness, the obtained results show that the watermark is resistant to the most common attacks used in watermarking with a normalized cross correlation rate higher than 0.9 for the majority of the attacks.
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Data Availability
The data used to support the findings of this study could be found freely here: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/awsaf49/cbis-ddsm-breast-cancer-image-dataset
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This work was supported by “La Direction Générale de la Recherche Scientifique et du Développement Technologique (DGRSDT)” of Algeria.
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Sayah, M.M., Redouane, K.M. & Amine, K. Stationary, continuous, and discrete wavelet-based approach for secure medical image transmission. Res. Biomed. Eng. 39, 167–178 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42600-023-00261-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42600-023-00261-3