Reliable Medical Image Communication in Healthcare IoT

Abstract

Images have been widely used in the medical field for various diagnostic purposes. In the field of healthcare IoT, secure communication of a medical image concerned with an individual is a crucial task. Embedding patients' personal information as an invisible watermark in their medical images helps to authenticate the ownership identification process. Reliable communication of medical image can be thereby ensured concerning authentication and integrity. Images in DICOM format with a pixel resolution of 8-bit depth are used for medical diagnostics. This chapter deals about the development of a lightweight algorithm to insert patients' identities as an invisible watermark in random edge pixels of DICOM images. This chapter describes the implementation of the proposed lightweight watermarking algorithm on a RISC microcontroller suitable for healthcare IoT applications. Imperceptibility level of the watermarked medical image was analyzed besides its lightweight performance validation on the constrained IoT platform.