In this paper, an algorithm for multiple watermarking based on discrete wavelet transforms (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) has been proposed for healthcare applications. For identity authentication purpose, the proposed method uses three watermarks in the form of medical Lump image watermark, the doctor signature/identification code and diagnostic information of the patient as the text watermarks. In order to improve the robustness performance of the image watermark, Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) is applied to the extracted image watermark to reduce the noise effects on the watermarked image. The security of the image watermark is also enhanced by using Arnold transform before embedding into the cover. Further, the symptom and signature text watermarks are also encoded by lossless arithmetic compression technique and Hamming error correction code respectively. The compressed and encoded text watermark is then embedded into the cover image. Experimental results are obtained by varying the gain factor, different sizes of text watermarks and the different cover image modalities. The results are provided to illustrate that the proposed method is able to withstand a different of signal processing attacks and has been found to be giving excellent performance for robustness, imperceptibility, capacity and security simultaneously. The robustness performance of the method is also compared with other reported techniques. Finally, the visual quality of the watermarked image is evaluated by the subjective method also. This shows that the visual quality of the watermarked images is acceptable for diagnosis at different gain factors. Therefore the proposed method may find potential application in prevention of patient identity theft in healthcare applications.

A proposed secure multiple watermarking technique based on DWT, DCT and SVD for application in medicine

In this article, a new DWT-SVD and DCT with Arnold Cat Map encryption based robust and blind watermarking scheme is proposed for copyright protection. The proposed scheme solves the most frequently occurring watermarking security problems in Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based schemes which are unauthorized reading and false-positive detection. This scheme also optimizes fidelity and robustness characteristics. The grey image watermark splits into two parts using four bits MSBs and four bits LSBs of each pixel. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of these MSBs and LSBs values are embedded into the middle singular value of each block having size 4 × 4 of the host image's one level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) sub-bands. The reason for incorporating Arnold Cat Map in the proposed scheme is to encode the watermark image before embedding it in the host image. The proposed scheme is a blind scheme and does not require the choice of scaling factor. Thus, the proposed scheme is secure as well as free from the false positive detection problem. The proposed watermarking scheme is tested for various malicious and non-malicious attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme is robust, imperceptible and secure to several attacks and common signal processing operations.

DWT-SVD and DCT based robust and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection

Watermarking is the process of embedding information into an image that can survive under distortions, while requiring the encoded image to have little or no perceptual difference with the original image. Recently, deep learning-based methods achieved impressive results in both visual quality and message payload under a wide variety of image distortions. However, these methods all require differentiable models for the image distortions at training time, and may generalize poorly to unknown distortions. This is undesirable since the types of distortions applied to watermarked images are usually unknown and non-differentiable. In this paper, we propose a new framework for distortion-agnostic watermarking, where the image distortion is not explicitly modeled during training. Instead, the robustness of our system comes from two sources: adversarial training and channel coding. Compared to training on a fixed set of distortions and noise levels, our method achieves comparable or better results on distortions available during training, and better performance overall on unknown distortions.

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Distortion Agnostic Deep Watermarking

With the widespread growth of medical images and improved communication and computer technologies in recent years, authenticity of the images has been a serious issue for E-health applications. In order to this, various notable watermarking techniques are developed by potential researchers. However, those techniques are unable to solve many issues that are necessary to be measured in future investigations. This paper surveys various watermarking techniques in medical domain. Along with the survey, general concepts of watermarking, major characteristics, recent applications, concepts of embedding and recovery process of watermark, and the summary of various techniques (in tabular form) are highlighted in brief. Further, major issues associated with medical image watermarking are also discussed to find out research directions for fledgling researchers and developers.

Watermarking techniques for medical data authentication: a survey

Digital image authentication is an extremely significant concern for the digital revolution, as it is easy to tamper with any image. In the last few decades, it has been an urgent concern for researchers to ensure the authenticity of digital images. Based on the desired applications, several suitable watermarking techniques have been developed to mitigate this concern. However, it is tough to achieve a watermarking system that is simultaneously robust and secure. This paper gives details of standard watermarking system frameworks and lists some standard requirements that are used in designing watermarking techniques for several distinct applications. The current trends of digital image watermarking techniques are also reviewed in order to find the state-of-the-art methods and their limitations. Some conventional attacks are discussed, and future research directions are given.

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/2/110/pdf

Digital Image Watermarking Techniques: A Review

The expansion of the Internet has frequently increased the availability of digital data such as audio, images and videos to the public. Digital watermarking is a technology being developed to ensure and facilitate data authentication, security and copyright protection of digital media. This paper incorporate the detail study watermarking definition, concept and the main contributions in this field such as categories of watermarking process that tell which watermarking method should be used. It starts with overview, classification, features, framework, techniques, application, challenges, limitations and performance metric of watermarking and a comparative analysis of some major watermarking techniques. In the survey our prime concern is image only.

/pdf/a-survey-of-digital-watermarking-techniques-applications-and-5ego6r66hn.pdf

A Survey of Digital Watermarking Techniques, Applications and Attacks

In some applications like, image recognition, compression and watermarking it is likely to be inefficient and unpractical to process the whole image. In that case it is necessary to segment the image before recognising, compressing or embedding some watermark. For this several image segmentation approaches are available to segment the image, to change the representation of the image or to simplify the image to make it more meaningful and easy to analyse. Image segmentation is the process of partitioning an image into multiple segments. This paper is describing a novel approach to image segmentation by performing some steps over the edges detected of all the objects present in the foreground or background. Also this approach will be very helpful in digital image watermarking application for more efficient embedding of watermark.

Ramneet Singh Chadha

Papers

A Survey of Digital Watermarking Techniques, Applications and Attacks

A Novel Approach to Image Segmentation