Zero-bit fragile watermarking for medical image tamper detection and recovery using RS code and lifting wavelet transform

Medical images are habitually composed of Regions of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-interest (RONI). ROI means the area containing the crucial information for diagnosis. To achieve the fidelity and integrity of the ROI, we propose a novel watermarking approach based on two great concepts zero-watermarking and Error Correcting Code (ECC). Tamper detection and recovery information are stored in RONI which accepts some visual quality degradation. Experimental results prove that our proposed approach produces a good performance in terms of imperceptibility and the ability to resist several hard attacks. The proposed scheme can recover 100% of the ROI until 15% of distortion is caused by salt and pepper noise. For multiplicative and Gaussian noise, the scheme has also a good capability of recovery (between 70% and 100%). With close to 20% of distortion, the system can recover 50% of the ROI. The proposed method has also a good capability of recovery against cropping and image processing operations.