A GPU-based (8, 4) Hamming decoder for secure transmission of watermarked medical images

Medical image watermarking has received increasing attention as wide security services in the e-diagnosis system, where the images are transmitted through the internet among the patient, primary physicians, and referred physicians. These images are highly prone to become corrupted and erroneous due to the inherent noise in the wireless medium. Such error results in serious adverse impacts including inconsistent and unreliable transmission, faulty watermark detection, and faulty diagnosis. To solve the problem, we propose a (8, 4) Hamming code based error correction. In addition, we implement the Hamming code on a graphics processing unit (GPU) to accelerate and meet the real-time requirement. The experimental results demonstrate that the GPU based approach exceedingly outperforms the CPU based error correction in terms of execution time.