NROI watermarking of medical images for content authentication

Abstract

Medical image is usually comprised of region of interest (ROI) and non region of interest (NROI). ROI is the region that contains the important information from diagnosis point of view so it must be stored without any distortion. We have proposed a digital watermarking technique which avoids the distortion of image in ROI by embedding the watermark information in NROI. The watermark is comprised of patient information, hospital logo and message authentication code, computed using hash function. Earlier BCH encryption of watermark is performed to ensure inaccessibility of embedded data to the adversaries.