A proposed security technique based on watermarking and encryption for digital imaging and communications in medicine

Abstract Nowadays; modern Hospital Data Management Systems (HDMSs) are applied in a computer network; in addition medicinal equipments produce medical images in a digital form. HDMS must store and exchange these images in a secured environment to provide image integrity and patient privacy. The reversible watermarking techniques can be used to provide the integrity and the privacy. In this paper, a security technique based on watermarking and encryption is proposed to be used for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM). It provides patient authentication, information confidentiality and integrity based on reversible watermark. To achieve integrity service at the sender side; a hash value based on encrypted MD5 is determined from the image. And to satisfy the reversible feature; R–S-Vector is determined from the image and is compressed based on a Huffman compression algorithm. After that to provide confidentiality and authentication services: the compressed R–S-Vector, the hash value and patient ID are concatenated to form a watermark then this watermark is encrypted using AES encryption technique, finally the watermark is embedded inside the medical image. Experimental results prove that the proposed technique can provide patient authentication services, image integrity service and information confidentiality service with excellent efficiency. Concluded results for all tested DICOM medical images and natural images show the following: BER equals 0, both of SNR and PSNR are consistent and have large values, and MSE has low value; the average values of SNR, PSNR and MSE are 52 dB, 57 dB and 0.12 respectively. Therefore, watermarked images have high imperceptibility, invisibility and transparency. In addition, the watermark extracted from the image at the receiver side is identical to the watermark embedded into the image in the sender side; as a result, the proposed technique is totally reversible, and the embedded watermark does not affect the quality of the original image.

[1]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Distortion-Free Data Embedding for Images , 2001, Information Hiding.

[2]  William Stallings,et al.  Cryptography and network security - principles and practice (3. ed.) , 2014 .

[3]  Nora Cuppens-Boulahia,et al.  Reversible Watermarking Based on Invariant Image Classification and Dynamic Histogram Shifting , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[4]  Nisar Ahmed Memon,et al.  Watermarking of Medical Images for Content Authentication and Copyright Protection , 2010 .

[5]  Xuelong Li,et al.  Robust Reversible Watermarking via Clustering and Enhanced Pixel-Wise Masking , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[6]  Malay Kumar Kundu,et al.  Effective Management of Medical Information Through A Novel Blind Watermarking Technique , 2012, Journal of Medical Systems.

[7]  G. Blelloch.  Introduction to Data Compression * , 2022 .

[8]  William Stallings,et al.  Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice , 1998 .

[9]  Wei Pan,et al.  Reversible watermarking based on invariant image classification and dynamical error histogram shifting , 2011, 2011 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[10]  刘杰,et al.  Microsoft Visual Studio 在电阻箱检定结果处理中的应用 , 2013 .

[11]  Samia Boucherkha,et al.  A Lossless Watermarking Based Authentication System For Medical Images , 2007, International Conference on Computational Intelligence.

[12]  Hossein Rabbani,et al.  A dual adaptive watermarking scheme in contourlet domain for DICOM images , 2011, Biomedical engineering online.

[13]  A. Murat Tekalp,et al.  Reversible data hiding , 2002, Proceedings. International Conference on Image Processing.

[14]  N. Memon,et al.  Adaptive data hiding scheme for medical images using integer wavelet transform , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Emerging Technologies.

[15]  Yun Q. Shi,et al.  Reversible Data Hiding , 2003, IWDW.

[16]  Hsi-Chin Hsin,et al.  Nested Quantization Index Modulation for Reversible Watermarking and Its Application to Healthcare Information Management Systems , 2011, Comput. Math. Methods Medicine.

[17]  David Salomon,et al.  Data Compression: The Complete Reference , 2006 .

[18]  A. S. Tolba,et al.  Wavelet Packets-Based Blind Watermarking for Medical Image Management , 2010, The open biomedical engineering journal.

[19]  Y.S. Lim,et al.  Multiple block based authentication watermarking for distribution of medical images , 2004, Proceedings of 2004 International Symposium on Intelligent Multimedia, Video and Speech Processing, 2004..

[20]  Timoteo Carletti,et al.  The Stochastic Evolution of a Protocell: The Gillespie Algorithm in a Dynamically Varying Volume , 2011, Comput. Math. Methods Medicine.

[21]  Khalid Sayood.  Lossless Compression Handbook , 2003 .

[22]  Gouenou Coatrieux,et al.  A joint encryption/watermarking algorithm for verifying the reliability of medical images: Application to echographic images , 2012, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[23]  C. Roux,et al.  Mixed Reversible and RONI Watermarking for Medical Image Reliability Protection , 2007, 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[24]  Tang Ming . Wei Lian. Si Tuo Lin Si,et al.  Cryptography and Network Security - Principles and Practice , 2015 .

[25]  Suzanne Kieffer,et al.  Feature extraction and selection for objective gait analysis and fall risk assessment by accelerometry , 2011, Biomedical engineering online.

[26]  Kyung Hyune Rhee,et al.  High Capacity Lossless Data Hiding , 2006, ICISS.