A watermarking scheme for source authentication, ownership identification, tamper detection and restoration for color medical images

This paper proposes a blind watermarking scheme that has ability of confidentiality, source authentication, ownership identification, integrity, tampering detection and restoration of the medical images. It embeds the hospital logo, electronic patient record and perceptual hash value of region of interest in the mid-frequency coefficients of discrete cosine transform of the region of non-interest of medical image. The region of interest of the image is restored against attacks including the desynchronization attacks and impulse noise attack, and the severity of tampering due to any attack is measured by comparing the difference between the original perceptual hash value of the region of interest and the extracted perceptual hash value of region of interest of watermarked image. Restoration is done that tampers the region of interest of the images. Number of medical image watermarking schemes that show resilient to many different types of singular and hybrid attacks is very few. The proposed method has inbuilt restoration schemes against different attacks such as rotation, scaling, translation, shearing, horizontal reflection, vertical reflection and impulse noise attacks. Comparison with the latest and state-of-art medical image watermarking schemes shows that the performance of the proposed method is superior to other methods.