Hybrid domain digital watermarking scheme based on improved differential evolution algorithm and singular value block embedding

The internet and related technologies have promoted the development of medical and health fields, especially remote diagnosis. As medical images may be stolen in the transmission process, the patient's personal information could be leaked. Aiming at the problem of privacy disclosure of colour medical images, a hybrid domain watermarking scheme based on improved differential evolution (DE) and the singular value block embedding (SVBE) is proposed in this study. Through this scheme, the image containing the patient's information is hidden in the patient's medical carrier image as a watermark. First, redistributed invariant lifting wavelet transform (RILWT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) are used to process the colour medical carrier image, and the high-frequency information in the integer wavelet domain of the watermark is embedded into the processed carrier image using the proposed singular value block embedding method based on the improved differential evolution algorithm. At the same time, to increase the security of the watermark scheme, a digital signature based on the SHA-384 hash function is designed for verification before watermark extraction. Compared with recent related research, the scheme has strong invisibility and robustness.