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A robust medical image watermarking against salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images

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Abstract

The ever-growing numbers of medical digital images and the need to share them among specialists and hospitals for better and more accurate diagnosis require that patients’ privacy be protected. During the transmission of medical images between hospitals or specialists through the network, the main priority is to protect a patient’s documents against any act of tampering by unauthorised individuals. Because of this, there is a need for medical image authentication scheme to enable proper diagnosis on patient. In addition, medical images are also susceptible to salt and pepper impulse noise through the transmission in communication channels. This noise may also be intentionally used by the invaders to corrupt the embedded watermarks inside the medical images. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this work addresses the issue of designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density of salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. For this purpose, combination of a spatial domain watermarking method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used. The region of non-interest (RONI) of MRI images from five different databases are used as embedding area and electronic patient record (EPR) is considered as embedded data. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) for their educational and financial support. This work is conducted at Advanced Informatics School (AIS) and funded by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (Grant no. R.K130000.7838.4F643).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Informatics School (AIS), Menara Razak, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Jalan Sultan Yahya Petra, 54100, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Seyed Mojtaba Mousavi & Azizah A. Manaf

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran

    Alireza Naghsh

  3. Computer Vision, Video, and Image Processing (CvviP) Research Lab, Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Skudai, Johor, Malaysia

    S. A. R. Abu-Bakar

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  1. Seyed Mojtaba Mousavi
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  2. Alireza Naghsh
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  3. Azizah A. Manaf
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  4. S. A. R. Abu-Bakar
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Correspondence to Azizah A. Manaf.

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Mousavi, S.M., Naghsh, A., Manaf, A.A. et al. A robust medical image watermarking against salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 10313–10342 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3622-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3622-9

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