Reversible watermarking scheme for medical image based on differential evolution

A reversible watermarking method is proposed with wavelet transforms and SVD.Signature and logo data are inserted by recursive dither modulation algorithm.DE is explored to design the quantization steps optimally.Good balance of imperceptibility, robustness and capacity is obtained by DE.Experiments show good performance and outperform the related algorithms. Currently, most medical images are stored and exchanged with little or no security; hence it is important to provide protection for the intellectual property of these images in a secured environment. In this paper, a new and reversible watermarking method is proposed to address this security issue. Specifically, signature information and textual data are inserted into the original medical images based on recursive dither modulation (RDM) algorithm after wavelet transform and singular value decomposition (SVD). In addition, differential evolution (DE) is applied to design the quantization steps (QSs) optimally for controlling the strength of the watermark. Using these specially designed hybrid techniques, the proposed watermarking technique obtains good imperceptibility and high robustness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is not only highly competitive, but also outperforms the existing methods.