A secure steganography for privacy protection in healthcare system

Private data in healthcare system require confidentiality protection while transmitting. Steganography is the art of concealing data into a cover media for conveying messages confidentially. In this paper, we propose a steganographic method which can provide private data in medical system with very secure protection. In our method, a cover image is first mapped into a 1D pixels sequence by Hilbert filling curve and then divided into non-overlapping embedding units with three consecutive pixels. We use adaptive pixel pair match (APPM) method to embed digits in the pixel value differences (PVD) of the three pixels and the base of embedded digits is dependent on the differences among the three pixels. By solving an optimization problem, minimal distortion of the pixel ternaries caused by data embedding can be obtained. The experimental results show our method is more suitable to privacy protection of healthcare system than prior steganographic works.