Privacy and protection of medical images ROI using SPLSB and bit-plane based watermarking

Abstract

In the current digital world, health departments and telemedicine systems are one among the sensitive data management systems of the users. Currently, at the time of managing the information by the authorities, the attackers have to tamper the medical data. It should happen while transmitting, storing and computing the data. In this paper, we propose a methodology for protecting the ROI of medical images data using Squint-Penultimate-Least Significant bits and Bit-planes of the covered image based watermarking technique. In this method, initially, the sensitive data of the medical image such as ROI segment can be detected using edge contour extraction method. Extracted ROI can act as a watermark which has required protection from the attackers. Later this watermark has protected by embedding into the chosen bit-plane of the source or cover image with SPLSB method. Thus generates a watermarked image which holds the watermark. Experiments have done on various medical images and the results were analyzed by considering performance evaluation factors. Thus, the proposed scheme is the robustness and effective method to protect the ROI of a medical image.