Joint Watermarking and Lossless JPEG-LS Compression for Medical Image Security

Abstract In this paper, we present a new joint watermarking-compression scheme the originality of which stands on the combination of the lossless compression standard JPEG-LS with the bit substitution watermarking modulation. This scheme allows the access to watermarking-based security services without decompressing the image. It becomes possible to trace images or to verify their authenticity directly from their compressed bitstream. Performance of our scheme, expressed in terms of embedding capacity and distortion, are evaluated on ultrasound images. They show that the watermarked images do not perceptually differ from their original counterparts while offering a capacity large enough to support various security services. We further illustrate how our scheme can be used for verifying the image integrity and authenticity.