RONI-based medical image watermarking using DWT and LSB amgorithm

Abstract

In recent years, hiding information in medical images is the largest usage to secure this information or garnet the integrity of the owner. But this embedding can distort the medical image and change the necessary patient information. In this paper, we propose a robust method for medical image watermarking; first of all. The original image is filtered by a sharpening filter for enhanced contrast then separate their two regions using snake segmentation. The embedding mark (an electronic patient record) is added to the frequency domain after applying Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) on the region of non-interest (RONI) using the last signification bit (LSB). This region has a predominantly black background where a region of interest (ROI) has the necessary patient information. This method preserves a high-quality watermarked image, and it improves authentication. Our method is evaluated by Pick Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR = 46.4039 for 512*512 bits image size) SNR, NC, and Histogram analysis.