Intelligent reversible watermarking in integer wavelet domain for medical images

The prime requirement of reversible watermarking scheme is that the system should be able to restore the cover work to its original state after extracting the hidden information. Reversible watermarking approaches, therefore, have wide applications in medical and defense imagery. In this paper, an intelligent reversible watermarking approach GA-RevWM for medical images is proposed. GA-RevWM is based on the concept of block-based embedding using genetic algorithm (GA) and integer wavelet transform (IWT). GA based intelligent threshold selection scheme is applied to improve the imperceptibility for a fixed payload or vice versa. The experimental results show that GA-RevWM provides significant improvement in terms of imperceptibility for a desired level of payload against the existing approaches. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.