Analysis of data hiding technologies for medical images

摘要

Current research on data hiding is more and more demonstrating that many applications can benefit from these technologies: among these, medical data management. Current medical record formats store in separated fields image data and the textual information, so that the link between image and patient occasionally could get mangled by protocol converters or tampering attacks. Moreover, if an intruder can access to the database, he is able to modify the attached text. Embedding patient's information directly into the image through data hiding technology can represent an useful safety measure. Data hiding technologies suitable for such an application must satisfy specific requirements, the most important are: a high payload reliably identifying a patient; the preservation of the quality of the host medical image, the robustness to content modification. According to this analysis, a comparison between different data hiding approaches will be presented, to evaluate the most suitable algorithms for medical applications. In particular two different kind of algorithms will be taken into account: one algorithm based on Bayes theory will be compared with algorithms following the new approach of modelling data hiding as communication with side-information at the transmitter. These methods will be tested and compared in the framework of medical data management in order to identify benefits and drawbacks of both the different approaches for such an application .