Robust Zero-Watermarking of Color Medical Images Using Multi-Channel Gaussian-Hermite Moments and 1D Chebyshev Chaotic Map

Abstract

Copyright protection of medical images is a vital goal in the era of smart healthcare systems. In recent telemedicine applications, medical images are sensed using medical imaging devices and transmitted to remote places for screening by physicians and specialists. During their transmission, the medical images could be tampered with by intruders. Traditional watermarking methods embed the information in the host images to protect the copyright of medical images. The embedding destroys the original image and cannot be applied efficiently to images used in medicine that require high integrity. Robust zero-watermarking methods are preferable over other watermarking algorithms in medical image security due to their outstanding performance. Most existing methods are presented based on moments and moment invariants, which have become a prominent method for zero-watermarking due to their favorable image description capabilities and geometric invariance. Although moment-based zero-watermarking can be an effective approach to image copyright protection, several present approaches cannot effectively resist geometric attacks, and others have a low resistance to large-scale attacks. Besides these issues, most of these algorithms rely on traditional moment computation, which suffers from numerical error accumulation, leading to numerical instabilities, and time consumption and affecting the performance of these moment-based zero-watermarking techniques. In this paper, we derived multi-channel Gaussian–Hermite moments of fractional-order (MFrGHMs) to solve the problems. Then we used a kernel-based method for the highly accurate computation of MFrGHMs to solve the computation issue. Then, we constructed image features that are accurate and robust. Finally, we presented a new zero-watermarking scheme for color medical images using accurate MFrGHMs and 1D Chebyshev chaotic features to achieve lossless copyright protection of the color medical images. We performed experiments where their outcomes ensure the robustness of the proposed zero-watermarking algorithms against various attacks. The proposed zero-watermarking algorithm achieves a good balance between robustness and imperceptibility. Compared with similar existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm has superior robustness, security, and time computation.

Robust, Secure and Semi-Blind Watermarking Technique Using Flexible Scaling Factor in Block-Based Wavelet Algorithm

“…FSF block watermarking algorithm results show that extraction from high frequencies (HH band) is more robust and secure than extraction from low frequencies (LL, HL and LH bands). One of the reasons for this is that high frequencies usually reside on the edge or corner of the object in the image, which is the most suitable place to hide secret information [50].…”

Robust zero‐watermarking algorithm based on discrete wavelet transform and daisy descriptors for encrypted medical image

“…However, there is a risk of malicious tampering, illegal copying, and information leakage of medical images in network transmission. Digital watermarking technology has the function of copyright protection and information hiding [5][6][7], which can effectively control the occurrence of various risks in the transmission process of medical images.…”

“…Transform domain watermarking is performed by adjusting the coefficients of the image transform domain for watermark embedding [13,14], and this type of algorithm has the characteristics of more complex operations, less information capacity, but high resistance to attacks. The commonly used transform domains are DCT [4,6,15,[18][19][20][21], DWT [1,3,5,10,[15][16][17]22], DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) [18], SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) [16,17,21] etc. Using a single transform domain does not meet the needs of all watermarking algorithms simultaneously, and to compensate for each other's shortcomings, most existing algorithms use hybrid domain techniques.…”

Invisible Shield: Unveiling an Efficient Watermarking Solution for Medical Imaging Security

“…The current landscape of medical image watermarking research is multifaceted, showcasing an array of approaches and methodologies [7,8]. Several published works have highlighted the importance of robustness, imperceptibility, and computational efficiency in watermarking algorithms [9,10].…”