Novel Hybrid Fusion-Based Technique for Securing Medical Images

Abstract

The security of images has gained great interest in modern communication systems. This is due to the massive critical applications that are based on images. Medical imaging is at the top of these applications. However, the rising number of heterogenous attacks push toward the development of securing algorithms and methods for imaging systems. To this end, this work considers developing a novel authentication, intellectual property protection, ownership, and security technique for imaging systems, mainly for medical imaging. The developed algorithm includes two security modules for safeguarding various picture kinds. The first unit is accomplished by applying watermarking authentication in the frequency domain. The singular value decomposition (SVD) is performed for the host image’s discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. The singular values (S) are divided into 64 × 64 non-overlapping blocks, followed by embedding the watermark in each block to be robust to any attack. The second unit is made up of two encryption layers to provide double-layer security to the watermarked image. The double random phase encryption (DRPE) and chaotic encryption have been tested and examined in the encryption unit. The suggested approach is resistant to common image processing attacks, including rotation, cropping, and adding Gaussian noise, according to the findings of the experiments. The encryption of watermarked images in the spatial and DCT domains and fused watermarked images in the DCT domain are all discussed. The transparency and security of the method are assessed using various measurements. The proposed approach achieves high-quality reconstructed watermarks and high security by using encryption to images and achieves robustness against any obstructive attacks. The developed hybrid algorithm recovers the watermark even in the presence of an attack with a correlation near 0.8.