Reversible information hiding scheme based on interpolation and histogram shift for medical images

Medical imaging and information management systems require transmission and storage of medical images over the Internet. Many reversible information hiding schemes for image have been proposed to ensure security and availability. In order to avoid the risk of medical information leakage and the medical image distortion, a reversible information hiding scheme based on interpolation and histogram shift for medical images has been proposed in this paper. The proposed adaptive interpolation between neighbor pixels (AIA) technique is used to obtain seed and non-seed pixels, which ensures the reversibility of the scheme while balancing the embedding capacity and the quality of marked image. Then, the image is divided into the region of interest (ROI) and the region of non-interest (NROI). Sensitive information such as electronic patient records (EPR) and electronic signatures of medical images are embedded as secret information. In the ROI, the corresponding bit histogram shift repeated embedding method (CBHSR) is adopted for embedding information to effectively avoid the problem of image distortion caused by histogram stretching. Experimental results show that algorithm not only has high embedding capacity, but also keeps the peak signal-to-noise ratio above 50dB, visual information fidelity and structural similarity above 0.99, which has good subjective and objective image quality.