Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition Based ECG Steganography for Secured Patient Information Transmission

Abstract

ECG Steganography provides secured transmission of secret information such as patient personal information through ECG signals. This paper proposes an approach that uses discrete wavelet transform to decompose signals and singular value decomposition (SVD) to embed the secret information into the decomposed ECG signal. The novelty of the proposed method is to embed the watermark using SVD into the two dimensional (2D) ECG image. The embedding of secret information in a selected sub band of the decomposed ECG is achieved by replacing the singular values of the decomposed cover image by the singular values of the secret data. The performance assessment of the proposed approach allows understanding the suitable sub-band to hide secret data and the signal degradation that will affect diagnosability. Performance is measured using metrics like Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL), percentage residual difference (PRD), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and bit error rate (BER). A dynamic location selection approach for embedding the singular values is also discussed. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a MIT-BIH database and the observations validate that HH is the ideal sub-band to hide data. It is also observed that the signal degradation (less than 0.6%) is very less in the proposed approach even with the secret data being as large as the sub band size. So, it does not affect the diagnosability and is reliable to transmit patient information.

Analysis of Cell Signal Transduction Based on Kullback–Leibler Divergence: Channel Capacity and Conservation of Its Production Rate during Cascade

“…In our previous studies [34,35], Shannon's entropy H m for m-th cascade was demonstrated. Using Equations (3), (5) and 6, entropy H m 0 at a priori (prior) state can be represented as:…”

“…It was introduced by Solomon Kullback and Richard A. Leibler, who discussed information source coding theory for information transmission efficiency [1]. At present, KLD finds diverse applications, including the imaging analytical field [2,3], hydrodynamics [4], clinical laboratory tests including electrocardiogram [5,6], network analysis [7,8] for biological applications [9], cellular biology [10], evaluating the bioequivalence of formulations of a drug [11], and experimental design for clinical study [12]. In this study, KLD is applied to analyze the cell information transmission, signal transduction, mediated by the cellular biochemical reaction.…”

Progressive Data Hiding in Integer Wavelet Transform of Electrocardiogram by Using Simple Decision Rule and Coefficient Calibration

“…Recently, data hiding has played a crucial role in protecting secret data in multimedia files, such as documents, images, and videos [1][2][3][4][5]. In addition, several researchers have presented data hiding for biomedical signals such as an electrocardiogram (ECG) to secure personal sensitive information, including patients' diagnoses [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…The average execution time was approximately 1.60 s and the size of the payload was only 32 bits; both of these problems may limit the usage of the method. On the basis of DWT and singular value decomposition, Jero et al [9] proposed a noteworthy ECG steganography method to secure information about patients. Experimental results indicated that the bit error rate (BER) of their method was <0.6% because the high-high subband of DWT was used for hiding the secret information.…”

Adaptive Electrocardiogram Steganography Based on 2D Approach with Predetermined Rules

“…To obtain robustness and secure authorized message, several scholars have presented ECG watermarking schemes to achieve the goal [10][11]. Most of the ECG steganographic methods are irreversible schemes [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], however, those methods often provide a high hiding capability and good resultant perceived quality with low error rate. Since our approach is an irreversible ECG steganography, only related topic is surveyed in this section.…”