Security protection of biomedical data using digital watermarking

Abstract

Digital watermarking is a technique that adds copyright marks or other verification messages to digital audio, image or video signals and documents.

The aim of this project is to apply digital watermarking in the application of secured volumetric medical images transmission through open network. The main benefits of this method are the guaranteed image authentication which current security system lacks, as well as the ability to locate the image areas that are altered without permission.

This report presents a reversible dual layer watermarking scheme adapted for 3-D DICOM medical images. The scheme uses a slice-based approach to 3-D watermarking. The proposed scheme modifies the pixels of individual 3-D image slices by a block-based spatial watermark insertion.

The proposed scheme is implemented with a user-friendly interface. This prototype has been successfully tested with DICOM medical image sets. The original medical image sets can be fully recovered at the receiver side. This function is particularly critical for medical image watermarking system where diagnosis is performed on the received images. In additional, the prototype has also been tested to be able to detect image areas where malicious modifications are made. However, this scheme can still be further improved on as it is not fully robust against certain attacks.