Analysis of DWT-DCT watermarking algorithm on digital medical imaging

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Digital Security
• Information Technology

Background:

• Digital recording and transmission of patient data necessitate robust security and authenticity measures.
• Medical image watermarking offers a solution for concealing patient information and verifying image integrity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a novel multiple watermarking method for enhancing the security of clinical medical images.
• To embed both quality feature property and private label property information as watermarks within medical images.

Main Methods:

• A hybrid approach combining Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for the region of interest (ROI) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for the non-interest region (NIR).
• DWT is applied to ROI, with watermarks embedded in the low-frequency sub-band (LL2).
• DCT is applied to non-overlapping blocks in NIR, utilizing zigzag transform and intermediate frequency coefficients for embedding.

Main Results:

• The proposed DWT-DCT watermarking method demonstrated effective performance.
• Key performance metrics included Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Measure, and Mean Square Error.
• The method achieved a notable PSNR value of 45.76 dB.

Conclusions:

• The developed multiple watermarking model is effective for securing clinical medical images.
• The proposed technique shows superior performance compared to existing methods in ensuring data security and authenticity.