Secured medical image watermarking with DNA codec

摘要

Modern healthcare systems are based on managing diagnostic information of patients through E-health. E-health refers to the Internet enabled healthcare applications involving transacting personal health records or information and other internet based services including e-Pharmacy where security threats is a major concern . This paper introduces a hybrid watermarking and encryption technique for copyright protection and authentication of medical images. The medical image is watermarked in wavelet domain where in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is used as watermark and hospital logo as the reference image. Embedding of the EHR data is based on energy band selection and in reference to the bit location in the reference image A Composite algorithm for improved image security is proposed by taking the advantages of DNA based image encryption and genetic algorithms (GA). A number of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) masks are created using logistic map function and DNA conversion rules. Then encryption is performed on the watermarked image to generate a number of cipher images. Genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to find the best DNA mask in iterative manner until the condition is met. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the proposed scheme to the available security attributes in both frequency and encryption domain while minimizing image distortion and also resists to various attacks.