Effective management of medical information through a novel blind watermarking technique

Medical Data Management (MDM) domain consists of various issues of medical information like authentication, security, privacy, retrieval and storage etc. Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) techniques have recently emerged as a leading technology to solve the problems associated with MDM. This paper proposes a blind, Contourlet Transform (CNT) based MIW scheme, robust to high JPEG and JPEG2000 compression and simultaneously capable of addressing a range of MDM issues like medical information security, content authentication, safe archiving and controlled access retrieval etc. It also provides a way for effective data communication along with automated medical personnel teaching. The original medical image is first decomposed by CNT. The Low pass subband is used to embed the watermark in such a way that enables the proposed method to extract the embedded watermark in a blind manner. Inverse CNT is then applied to get the watermarked image. Extensive experiments were carried out and the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through both subjective and quantitative measures. The experimental results and comparisons, confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed technique in the MDM paradigm.