A Dual Watermarking Approach for DICOM Images

In this paper, we come up with a new watermarking method combining a zero-watermarking approach with a non-zero-watermarking approach for the purpose of authentication and identification of medical DICOM images, as well as the confidentiality of patient information. Indeed, the storage and transmission of medical images need strong confidentiality, authentication and integrity. In the proposed approach, pertinent features extracted from the DICOM image are used, on the one hand, for the zero-watermarking based on the Jacobian model, and on the other hand, to construct a watermark embedded in the black background region using linear interpolation technique. The watermark is encapsulated only in the black background region in order to avoid affecting the anatomical part whose modification may cause a wrong diagnosis. The main contribution of this paper is the method used to generate a robust watermark based on the Jacobian model and pertinent features extracted from the medical image. Experimental results reveal the quality of the method proposed: high PSNR (peak signal to noise ratio) and SSIM (similarity structure index measure) values as well as high robustness against different attacks.