With the growth in Internet and digital technology, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Telemedicine have become buzzwords in healthcare. A large number of medical images and information is shared through a public network in these applications. This paper proposes a region-based hybrid Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) scheme to ensure the authenticity, authorization, integrity, and confidentiality of the medical images transmitted through a public network in IoMT. In the proposed scheme, medical image is segmented into Region of Interest (RoI) and Region of Non-Interest (RoNI). RoI tamper detection and recovery bits are embedded in RoI to ensure the integrity of the medical image. RoI is watermarked using adaptive Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution with respect to the hiding capacity map for higher RoI imperceptibility and accuracy in tamper detection and recovery. Electronic Patient Record (EPR) is compressed using Huffman coding and encrypted using a pseudo-random key (secret key) to provide higher confidentiality and payload. Encrypted EPR, QR code of hospital logo, and RoI recovery bits are embedded in RoNI using Discrete Wavelet Transform-Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD) hybrid transforms to achieve a robust watermark. The proposed scheme is tested under various geometric and non-geometric attacks such as filtering, compression, rotation, salt and pepper noise and shearing. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has high imperceptibility, robustness, security, payload, tamper detection, and recovery accuracy under image processing attacks. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be used in the transmission of medical images and EPR in IoMT. Relevance of the proposed scheme is established by its superior performance in comparison to some of the popular existing schemes.
In the past decade, rapid development in digital communication has led to prevalent use of digital images. More importantly, confidentiality issues have also come up recently due to the increase in digital image transmission across the Internet. Therefore, it is necessary to provide high imperceptibility and security to digitally transmitted images. In this paper, a novel blind digital image watermarking scheme is introduced tackling secured transmission of digital images, which provides a higher quality regarding both imperceptibility and robustness parameters. A block based hybrid IWT- SVD transform is implemented for robust transmission of digital images. To ensure high watermark security, the watermark is encrypted using a Pseudo random key which is generated adaptively from cover and watermark images. An encrypted watermark is embedded in randomly selected low entropy blocks to increase the security as well as imperceptibility. Embedding positions within the block are identified adaptively using a Blum–Blum–Shub Pseudo random generator. To ensure higher visual quality, Initial Scaling Factor (ISF) is chosen adaptively from a cover image using image range characteristics. ISF can be optimized using Nature Inspired Optimization (NIO) techniques for higher imperceptibility and robustness. Specifically, the ISF parameter is optimized by using three well-known and novel NIO-based algorithms such as Genetic Algorithms (GA), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), and Firefly Optimization algorithm. Experiments were conducted for the proposed scheme in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, security, embedding rate, and computational time. Experimental results support higher effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, performance comparison has been done with some of the existing state-of-the-art schemes which substantiates the improved performance of the proposed scheme.
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