Associative Watermarking Scheme for Medical Image Authentication

With the widespread and increasing use of internet and digital forms of image; and the convencience of medical professionals that the future of health care will be shaped by teleradiology and technologies such as telemedicine in general. In addition to the various radiological modalities which produce a variety of digital medical files most often datasets and images. These files should be protected from unwanted modification of their contents, especially as they contain vital medical information. Thus their protection and authentication seems to be of great importance and this need will rise along with the future standardization of exchange of data between hospitals or between patients and doctors. In this paper, an associative watermarking scheme is conducted to perform associative watermarking rules to the images which reducts the amount of embedded data, vector quantization indexing scheme is used to embed watermark for the purpose of image authentication. The vector quantization decoding technique is applied to reconstruct the watermarked image from the watermarked index table. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust. The watermarked images are resistant to severe image processing attcks such as Gaussian noise, brightness, blurring, sharpening, cropping, and JPEG lossy compression.