A New Medical Image Watermarking Technique with Finer Tamper Localization

Medical imaging and information management systems require transmission of medical images over the Internet. Many image watermarking techniques have been proposed in recent years to ensure the integrity and authenticity of medical images transferred over insecure networks. In this work, we propose a new medical image watermarking technique to detect tampered regions on medical images with finer accuracy by authenticating 4 × 4 blocks and without restricting region of interest (ROI) size. The proposed method can mark a 4 × 4 pixel block if it has even one tampered pixel, while similar methods (which have no ROI size restriction) mark 8 × 8, 16 × 16, and 40 × 40 pixel blocks. Modified difference expansion (MDE) and least significant bit (LSB) embedding techniques are used together first in the literature by the method to embed authentication bits into corresponding blocks. The method uses a small 4 × 4 window to mark the tampered region. Experimental results show that the proposed method detects tampered regions on medical images with high accuracy and can be used by all medical image modalities. The results also indicate that the method has finer accuracy and no ROI size restriction compared to similar works reported in the literature.