A new hybrid watermarking algorithm for MRI medical images using DWT and hash functions

This paper deals with a blind hybrid digital watermarking algorithm for the copyright protection and authentication of magnetic resonance tomography images. Medical image watermarking requires extreme care when embedding watermark information in the medical images, to protect the image quality from being violated and to avoid the wrong diagnosis that might occur. The proposed algorithm contains robust watermark for the ownership protection and fragile watermarks for checking the authenticity. In the proposed algorithm, the medical image is divided into two regions, called the Region of Interest and Region of Non-Interest using histogram technique and the watermarks are embedded in both wavelet domain and spatial domain in the Region of Non-Interest Area. The proposed hybrid watermarking technique was successfully tested on a variety of MRI medical images and offerd high peak signal to noise ratio and similarity structure index measure values.