A FRT - SVD Based Blind Medical Watermarking Technique for Telemedicine Applications

1. Introduction

In the last few years, medical treatments and diagnosis of the patients are being solved with the support of a variety of medical data such as images or signals. While the examples of medical images which are widely used are Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), X-ray, Computerized Tomography (CT) and Ultrasound (US), the examples of 1-D medical signals are ECG and EEG signals. Nowadays, it has become a common practice to share medical data among doctors and radiologists for better diagnosis, health solution, and treatment. Transferring medical images over a transmission medium is referred to as telemedicine (American Hospital Association, 2015; Yassin, 2015). The telemedicine aids in emergency treatment, home monitoring, military applications and medical education (Yassin, 2015) to name a few. Security of medical images becomes necessary when they are transferred over any open access network. Corruption or modification of medical images by someone or some process leads to serious health issues for any individual. There is in fact high probability for the medical images being corrupted or modified by various intentional and unintentional processing during storage or transmission over a medium. While various techniques such as cryptography and steganography are available for protecting medical images, the digital watermarking technique is the proven solution for copyright protection (Borra et al., 2017; Thanki et al., 2017; Lakshmi and Borra, 2016; Borra and Lakshmi, 2015; Borra and Swamy, 2014; Borra et al., 2012; Borra and Swamy, 2012; Thanki et al., 2011; Borra and Swamy, 2009).