Robust watermarking in non-ROI of medical images based on DCT-DWT

• Published in: 2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2016; pp. 1200 - 1203
• Main Authors: Jamali, M., Samavi, S., Karimi, N., Soroushmehr, S. M. R., Ward, K., Najarian, K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.08.2016
• Subjects: Algorithms; Diagnostic Imaging; Discrete cosine transforms; Discrete wavelet transforms; Humans; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; Medical diagnostic imaging; Robustness; Watermarking; Wavelet Analysis
• ISSN: 1557-170X
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2016.7590920

Increasing demand and utilization of telemedicine require transmission of medical information and images over internet. Since authenticity of received images is crucial and patient's information should be included with minimum changes in images, robust watermarking schemes are needed. In this paper, we propose a robust watermark method that embeds patient's information outside the region of interest (ROI) in medical image. In order to find appropriate regions for embedding, we use saliency as a means of measuring importance of regions and find blocks having minimum overlap with the ROI. The algorithm employs wavelet transform and also discrete cosine transform (DCT) domains in the embedding stage and redundantly embeds watermark to increase robustness against possible alterations. Moreover, voting is utilized in the extraction phase. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method and better results are obtained as compared to comparable methods with same size of the watermarked data.