RONI-Based medical image watermarking using DWT and LSB algorithms

Abstract

In recent years, hiding information in medical images is the largest usage to secure this information or garnet the integrity of the owner, the embedding can distort the medical image and change the necessary health patient information. In this paper, we propose a robust method for medical image watermarking to secure patient data when it transmits in a non-secure channel. First of all, the original image is filtered by a sharpening filter for enhanced contrast then separated into two regions using snake segmentation. The embedding mark (Electronic Patient Record) is added to the frequency domain after applying Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) on the region of non-interest (RONI) using the last signification bit (LSB). This region has a predominantly black background; the region of interest (ROI) has the necessary patient information. This method preserves a high-quality watermarked image, and it improves imperceptibility, security, and authentication. Our method is evaluated by Pick Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR = 46.4039 for 512 * 512 bits image size), SNR, NC, and histogram analysis, and it’s compared with existing schemes