Joint watermarking encryption compression algorithm for securing an e-healthcare application

Abstract

Radiological imaging generates large data volumes for diagnosing. These data volumes still constitute an immense challenge for individual radiology practices, either when complying with the archive, hacker manipulation or swiftly distributing images among specialists as part of the diagnostic process. Analyzing images through illegal distortions may lead to inaccurate medical decisions. Watermarking techniques can be used to authenticate images, detect, and recover illegal changes made to teleradiology images as well. In this paper, a new blind medical image watermarking joint crypto-compression system is proposed to simultaneously achieve watermarking and compression. A discrete wavelet transform is applied to the medical image to locate different frequency sub-bands. The watermark is scrambled using one-dimensional chaotic map generator with uniform distribution modulo-one transformations for generating highly independent and uniformly distributed random chaotic sequences. A particle crypto-compression algorithm is applied for the insertion step: the scrambled watermark is inserted into the highest singular value derived from the compressed low-frequency sub-band, ensuring a delicate balance between imperceptibility and robustness. From the conducted tests and comparison of the obtained results with other techniques, we concluded that the robustness of the algorithm under various attacks was improved by the excellent value of the NC parameter, especially in the case of compression and geometric attacks.