Medical images protection and authentication using hybrid DWT-DCT and SHA256-MD5 hash functions

摘要

This paper deals with a blind digital watermarking technique for the ownership protection and content authentication of X-ray and MRI medical images. Extreme care is required before embedding watermarking information in medical images, to protect the image quality to avoid the wrong diagnosis. The proposed watermarking technique contains a robust watermark for the ownership protection and fragile watermarks for the content authentication. In the watermarking technique, the medical image is divided into regions and the watermark information is embedded in both the transform domain and the spatial domain. The proposed watermarking technique was successfully tested on a variety of X-ray and MRI medical images and offered high peak signal to noise ratios, similarity structure index measure values and wavelet domain signal to noise rations.