A novel watermarking method for medical image security enhancement

Keywords: LSB, DWT, DCT, Arnold Scrambling, RGB Image, Medical Image Watermarking, NC, PSNR As the world is becoming increasingly digitized, with the advancement of technology, storing and transmitting medical images via internet has been made possible. And tampering of the images has come to the attention. So how to keep authenticity and integrity of medical images is a question that should be addressed with urgence. This thesis takes into consideration of characteristic and nature of medical images and throughly studies, evaluates digital image watermarking algorithms, and based on literature review develops a new watermarking algorithm for medical image as an effort to make watermarking scheme more attack-resistant. In this study, the color image is chosen as cover image and decomposed into R, G, and B color channels, then DWT watermarking algorithm is applied on R matrix, which consists of R channel, DCT is applied on G channel, last channel B is processed with LSB watermarking algorithm. After reading the watermark image, which is a medical image, Arnold Scrambling is used to jumble pixels of watermark image in order to provide another level of security to the whole watermarking scheme. The performance of proposed watermark algorithm is evaluated and analysed using widely accepted Normalized Correlation and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio. The experimental results show that imperceptibility of proposed watermarking scheme is relatively high, suggesting that the new approach is considered successful in achieving acceptable image quality.