Blind and Robust Watermarking Scheme in Hybrid Domain for Copyright Protection of Medical Images

Abstract

This work presents a robust watermarking technique in hybrid domain for the copyright claim of medical images. The scheme is a fusion of three popular transforms: Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The input image is first separated into region of interest (ROI) and region of non-interest (RONI). The DWT is applied on RONI to get low and high frequency bands. The low frequency band is then segmented into $4\times 4$ blocks. The Human Visual System (HVS) is applied to select the potential blocks for implanting watermark content. Each $4\times 4$ selected block is further subdivided into four $2\times 2$ carrier matrices. The SVD is applied to each carrier matrix. Finally, the hidden information is implanted by altering the largest diagonal singular values of four $2\times 2$ matrices. The technique is blind, so host image is not needed for the extraction of hidden information. The proposed scheme achieves higher values of imperceptibility as well as robustness. Experimental results reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the techniques currently reported in the literature by achieving higher values of imperceptibility in the form of PSNR with value of 44.0567 decibels (dB) and SSIM value of 0.9800. At the same time it achieves excellent values of robustness with maximum NCC value of 1.000 and minimum BER with value of 0.000.

Keywords

• Medical image watermarking
• copyright protection
• singular value decomposition
• medical images
• ROI and RONI