Wavelet based robust watermarking scheme for copyright enforcement and integrity control in tele-ophthalmology

Abstract

Tele-medicine permits medical images to be transmitted among health care centers through the insecure open networks for clinical investigation and for improved healthcare stipulations. There is a growing need for copyright enforcement technologies in these networked multimedia systems. This paper proposes an advanced and modified method to watermark information into a biomedical retinal cover image which aims to provide a robust and adaptive system for medical image protection against authentication and copyright infringement issues in tele-ophthalmological applications. Watermark is embedded in low frequency band using Singular values. Both methods strategically combined increase the level of security of proposed method. In short, a as a new SVD-DWT watermarking algorithm which is robust against various attacks is presented. Performance of the proposed method has been evaluated by assessing the method on metrics MSE (Mean Square Error), PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and NC (Normalized Correlation). Experimental results illustrate the suitability of the algorithm for application in tele-ophthalmology.