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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Steganography techniques for ECG signals : A survey

01 Dec 2016-pp 269-273
TL;DR: Various ECG Steganography techniques that have been used by researchers are discussed; in which patient details and diagnosis report are embedded into ECG signals.
Abstract: Medical Images have been widely used to diagnose and detect the abnormalities in the human body. In this study, we have focused on ECG (Electrocardiography) signals which play a vital role in diagnosing Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD). CVD is most prevalent among the people because of changing lifestyle, Age, Tobacco, etc. According to the WHO (World Health Organization) report in 2012, around 17 million people die each year because of CVD, which represents 31% of the overall death rate. Due to the advancement in the e-Health care system, most of the ECG signals along with the patient's sensitive data are transmitted among doctors and hospitals for detailed analysis. According to the HIPAA act, it should be made sure that patient's details are to be sent securely during the transmission. In this study various ECG Steganography techniques that have been used by researchers are discussed; in which patient details and diagnosis report are embedded into ECG signals.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
11 Oct 2018-Sensors
TL;DR: Experimental work on the assessment of the loss of ECG (electrocardiogram signal) diagnostic quality from the industrial standard EN60601-2-25:2015 point of view is presented and the Symlet of 11-th order is found as the best of the wavelets that were tested.
Abstract: Watermarking is currently investigated as an efficient and safe method of embedding additional patient or environment-related data into the electrocardiogram. This paper presents experimental work on the assessment of the loss of ECG (electrocardiogram signal) diagnostic quality from the industrial standard EN60601-2-25:2015 point of view. We implemented an original time-frequency watermarking technique with an adaptive beat-to-beat lead-independent data container design. We tested six wavelets, six coding bit depth values (including the automatic noise-dependent one) and two types of watermark content to find the conditions that are necessary for watermarked ECG to maintain the compliance with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) requirements for interpretation performance. Unlike other authors, we did not assess the differences of signal values, but errors in ECG wave delineation results. The results of a total of 7300 original and watermarked 10 s ECGs were statistically processed to reveal possible interpretation quality degradation due to watermarking. Finally we found (1) the Symlet of 11-th order as the best of the wavelets that were tested; (2) the important role of ECG wave delineation and noise tracking procedures; (3) the high influence of the watermark-to-noise similarity of amplitude and values distribution and (4) the stability of the watermarking capacity for different heart rates in atrial rhythms.

10 citations


Cites methods from "Steganography techniques for ECG si..."

  • ...Suganya [13] is specifically focused on steganography methods using the ECG as a carrier signal....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors proposed a solution combining data encryption techniques and multiscale signal analysis for securing patients' confidential data, where the confidential patient information and the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal are first encrypted with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) method.
Abstract: The transmission of confidential information over an open communication channel is susceptible to many threats like copyright infringement, eavesdropping and hacking. In this paper, we propose a solution combining data encryption techniques and multiscale signal analysis for securing patients’ confidential data. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is first applied to an ECG signal. The confidential patient information and the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal are then encrypted with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) method. Finally, the output of the encryption is hidden in an image to form the stego image and transferred to a medical server. While cryptography ensures the confidentiality of the data modified by the encryption process, steganography enhance the security. The evaluation of the proposed system was performed with real data and quantitative parameters such as Percent Residual Difference (PRD), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The experimental results show the proposed scheme has a good encryption effect and a strong ability to resist detection compared with the existing methods.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
30 Dec 2018
TL;DR: A method for integrating the exercise and environmental data into a digital ECG structure by watermarking technique is presented and it is proved the watermarked ECG to maintain the wave borders accuracy within tolerance limits.
Abstract: Exercise test is worldwide recognized as a valuable tool for investigating ST segment-based ischemia markers. Due to load-related risk, the test is reserved for office use, what causes inconvenience, limits patients participation rate and precludes screening for early ischemia stages. Transferring the diagnosis to patients' premises and using everyday activities as a stimulus is an interesting alternative, but needs reliable recording of physical load data. This paper presents a method for integrating the exercise and environmental data into a digital ECG structure by watermarking technique. The method analyses the time-scale ECG representation, detects the bandgap, where the bandwidth of actual cardiac content is lower than the throughput of digital series, detects the noise and replaces it by exercise-related data. Unless in irregular signals, the capacity of data container can accommodate an accompanying accelerometer and environment-related signals without deteriorating the ECG content. This makes possible to perform ECG exercise test in home conditions without additional transmission channels or data structures. The method was tested with CSE database accordingly to EN60601-2-25:2015 and proved the watermarked ECG to maintain the wave borders accuracy within tolerance limits. Consequently, restoration of original ECG record is not necessary. The method was also tested with anonymized stress-test records, which were watermarked with accelerometer data and re-interpreted to yield results fairly comparable to original diagnoses.

Cites methods from "Steganography techniques for ECG si..."

  • ...In case of ECG various approaches were proposed [10-11], however we use the concept of instantaneous bandwidth of the electrocardiogram (IBE) developed in our previous papers [12-13]....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
08 Jun 2014
TL;DR: The state-of-art of the various wavelet based image watermarking techniques in spatial as well as in transform domain based on the robustness, imperceptibility, capacity and security are reviewed.
Abstract: In this paper, we have reviewed the state-of-art of the various wavelet based image watermarking techniques in spatial as well as in transform domain based on the robustness, imperceptibility, capacity and security. The embedding and extraction methods suggested by various researchers/scientists have been studied along with their advantages and disadvantages. We have also discussed some important research challenges and requirements for making the watermarking system more efficient. It will be more important for researchers to implement effective watermarking method.

52 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This study presents two types of data hiding methods based on coefficient alignment for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, namely, lossy and reversible ECG steganographys, both of which are capable of hiding confidential patient data in ECG signals.
Abstract: This study presents two types of data hiding methods based on coefficient alignment for electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, namely, lossy and reversible ECG steganographys. The lossy method is divided into high-quality and high-capacity ECG steganography, both of which are capable of hiding confidential patient data in ECG signals. The reversible data hiding method can not only hide secret messages but also completely restore the original ECG signal after bit extraction. Simulations confirmed that the perceived quality generated by the lossy ECG steganography methods was good, while hiding capacity was acceptable. In addition, these methods have a certain degree of robustness, which is rare in conventional ECG stegangraphy schemes. Moreover, the proposed reversible ECG steganography method can not only successfully extract hidden messages but also completely recover the original ECG data.

33 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
19 Apr 2016
TL;DR: The aim of this paper is design of image steganographic method with high secure level and high non-perceptibility level and the relation between security and capacity of the method was improved by special compression of QR code before the embedding process.
Abstract: This paper is focused on proposal of image steganographic method that is able to embedding of encoded secret message using Quick Response Code (QR) code into image data Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) domain is used for the embedding of QR code, while embedding process is additionally protected by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher algorithm In addition, typical characteristics of QR code was broken using the encryption, therefore it makes the method more secure The aim of this paper is design of image steganographic method with high secure level and high non-perceptibility level The relation between security and capacity of the method was improved by special compression of QR code before the embedding process Efficiency of the proposed method was measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and achieved results were compared with other steganographic tools

32 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A method is proposed to embed patient confidential data into ECG signal, while keeping its high visual quality, and a unified embedding-scrambling method is used to guarantee the security of patient privacy as well as theECG signal itself.
Abstract: Nowadays telecardiology is widely popular due to the fact that an increasing number of people are suffering from cardiac disease in the world. Therefore huge amount of ECG signal as well as patient confidential information will be transmitted via the Internet. Ibaida's wavelet-based data hiding technique aims to protect patient confidential data utilizing ECG signal as a host media. But it cannot completely reconstruct the original ECG signal. Any alteration of the ECG may lead to an inaccurate diagnosis conclusion drawn by the doctor, which cannot be accepted by patients. In this paper, our elemental standpoint requires that both patient information and ECG signal must be perfectly restored at the extraction side. Firstly a method is proposed to embed patient confidential data into ECG signal, while keeping its high visual quality. Then we use a unified embedding-scrambling method to guarantee the security of patient privacy as well as the ECG signal itself. The structure of watermarked ECG signal is severely deconstructed. Both of the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods are reversible. Moreover the latter scheme can achieve high information payload.

30 citations


"Steganography techniques for ECG si..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...7 Wang et al, 2015 PRD PPE and HS, UES Two methods have been proposed to perform ECG reversible data hiding using spatial domain techniques....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Mar 2016
TL;DR: An attempt has been made to perform ECG steganography using Discrete Wavelet Transform - Singular Value Decomposition method with additive quantization scheme and it is observed that the robustness of hidden data is improved owing to BCH codes.
Abstract: ECG steganography hides patient's confidential data into their Electrocardiogram during transmission/storage of medical records, in order to ensure protection of patient privacy. Efficiency of a steganography method can be estimated using imperceptibility and robustness of hidden data which are estimated using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Bit Error Rate metrics, respectively. In this research work, an attempt has been made to perform ECG steganography using Discrete Wavelet Transform — Singular Value Decomposition method with additive quantization scheme. A vital challenge in steganography is that affects the imperceptibility and robustness of watermark. The novelty of proposed work is that improves the robustness of hidden data using BCH error-correcting codes. MIT-BIH database is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed ECG steganography method. It is observed that the robustness of hidden data is improved owing to BCH codes.

4 citations


"Steganography techniques for ECG si..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...5 Jero et al, 2016 PSNR, PRD, BER DWT and SVD It is observed that the usage of BCH code corrects the bit error by 28.4% but the PSNR value has been reduced by 10.5%....

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  • ...Jero et al [4] have proposed a technique for performing DWT – SVD based ECG Steganography....

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  • ...6 Jero et al, 2015 KL, PRD, PSNR, BER DWT and SVD , CACO BER was observed as 0% for all the test cases and PSNR% found to be decreasing at the rate of 11% for every 30% increase of watermark size....

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  • ...LITERATURE SURVEY Jero et al [1] proposed an approach to perform ECG steganography using curvelet transform....

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  • ...In 2016, Jero et al [5] have proposed a robust ECG Steganography method in order to embed the Bose – Chaudhuri – Hocquengham (BCH) error – correcting coded patient data in the ECG signal using DWT – SVD technique....

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