Robust watermarking scheme for medical image using optimization method

Abstract

Currently, most medical images are stored and exchanged without any consideration of security, and hence it is highly desirable to provide content protection for medical images that are used in a secured environment. In this paper, a new and robust watermarking method is proposed to address this security issue. Specifically, signature information and textual data are inserted into the original medical images. The integer wavelet transform (IWT) are combined with singular value decomposition (SVD) to provide robustness in the proposed method. Meanwhile, differential evolution (DE) is used to optimally design the quantization steps (QSs) for controlling the watermarking strength. With hybrid techniques such as IWT, SVD, and DE, the proposed watermarking algorithm not only achieves good imperceptibility, but also high robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods.