Watermarking SDK implementation to facilitate integration in a secure healthcare environment

The implementation of digital watermarking technology in healthcare applications is still in its infancy; however, the benefits of exploring this technology towards secure and efficient health data management are steadily propagated and realized by the research community. The paper presents the architecture of a watermarking software development kit (SDK), which provides multiple watermarking functionality and can be customized according to the targeted medical application, in order to address security of sensitive data, origin and data authentication, image archiving and retrieval. Two use cases of the proposed watermarking SDK are presented, the one involving access to the watermarking engine through a user interface, and the other referring to the case that the engine is embedded into the image acquisition device. The nature of the embeddable information that is applicable in each use case is also described.