Abstract
Telemedicine systems are used to transfer medical images between hospitals and doctors for consultation in many countries recently. It is crucial to ensure integrity of medical images transferred on unencrypted channels. Many medical image watermarking techniques have been proposed in the literature to deal with this problem. Thermal imaging to detect dense vascular regions is a new medical imaging modality gaining popularity to enhance diagnosis of breast cancer. Thermal images with large smooth areas and Region of Interest (ROI) have different characteristics compared to traditional medical images and require new image watermarking methods. A new thermal image watermarking algorithm utilizing Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), Modified Difference Expansion (MDE) and Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS) has been proposed for e-healthcare applications in this paper. IWT coefficients of thermal image are expanded by the MDE to make more consecutive blocks expandable. Location Map (LM) becomes more compressible if there are many consecutive blocks. Thus, larger ROI can be watermarked by the proposed method. The method also uses SSSS to share LM into meaningless shares embedded into border regions. Sharing LM by the SSSS makes it possible to reconstruct it even if some of the thermal image borders are removed inadvertently or modified on purpose to break the watermark. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method has better embedding capacity and good imperceptibility compared to similar methods reported in the literature. Besides, it has expanded ROI size and also is the first method which considers border region attacks in medical image watermarking.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alattar AM (2004) Reversible watermark using the difference expansion of a generalized integer transform. IEEE Trans Image Process 13(8):1147–1156
Al-Haj A (2014) Secured telemedicine using region-based watermarking with tamper localization. J Digit Imaging 27(6):737–750
Das S, Kundu MK (2013) Effective management of medical information through ROI-lossless fragile image watermarking technique. Comput Methods Prog Biomed 111(3):662–675
Daubechies I, Sweldens W (1998) Factoring wavelet transforms into lifting steps. J Fourier Anal Appl 4(3):247–269
Deng X et al (2013) Authentication and recovery of medical diagnostic image using dual reversible digital watermarking. J Nanosci Nanotechnol 13(3):2099–2107
Eswaraiah R, Reddy ES (2015) Robust medical image watermarking technique for accurate detection of tampers inside region of interest and recovering original region of interest. IET Image Process 9(8):615–625
Eswaraiah R, Sreenivasa Reddy E (2014) Medical image watermarking technique for accurate tamper detection in ROI and exact recovery of ROI. International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications 2014:13
Guo X, Zhuang TG (2009) A region-based lossless watermarking scheme for enhancing security of medical data. J Digit Imaging 22(1):53–64
Huang L (2014) A fragile watermark method for improving medical images security. J Comput 9(9):2043–2049
Liew S-C, Liew S-W, Zain JM (2013) Tamper localization and lossless recovery watermarking scheme with ROI segmentation and multilevel authentication. J Digit Imaging 26(2):316–325
Maheshkar S (2017) Region-based hybrid medical image watermarking for secure telemedicine applications. Multimed Tools Appl 76(3):3617–3647
Makbol NM, Khoo BE, Rassem TH (2016) Block-based discrete wavelet transform-singular value decomposition image watermarking scheme using human visual system characteristics. IET Image Process 10(1):34–52
Mishra A et al (2014) Optimized gray-scale image watermarking using DWT–SVD and Firefly Algorithm. Expert Syst Appl 41(17):7858–7867
Nyeem H, Boles W, Boyd C (2013) Utilizing least significant bit-planes of RONI pixels for medical image watermarking. Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), 2013 International Conference on. IEEE
Parah SA et al (2017) Information hiding in medical images: a robust medical image watermarking system for E-healthcare. Multimed Tools Appl 76(8):10599–10633
Shamir A (1979) How to share a secret. Commun ACM 22(11):612–613
Shi H, Lv F (2010) A blind digital watermark technique for color image based on integer wavelet transform." Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science (ICBECS), 2010 International Conference on. IEEE, 1–4
Silva LF, Saade DCM, Sequeiros GO, Silva AC, Paiva AC, Bravo RS, Conci A (2014) A New Database for Breast Research with Infrared Image. Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics 4(1):92–100
Thabit R, Khoo BE (2015) Medical image authentication using SLT and IWT schemes. Multimed Tools Appl:1–24
Ulutas M, Ulutas G, Nabiyev V (2011) Medical image security and EPR hiding using Shamir's secret sharing scheme. J Syst Softw 84(3):341–353
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare that this article is original, has not been published before, is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere and there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication. The authors confirm that the manuscript has been read and approved by all named authors and that there are no other persons who satisfied the criteria for authorship but are not listed. The authors further confirm that the order of authors listed in the manuscript has been approved by all of them.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ustubioglu, A., Ulutas, G. & Ustubioglu, B. IWT-MDE based reversible thermal image watermarking enhanced with secret sharing mechanism. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 22269–22299 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7529-0
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7529-0