A Lossless Watermarking Based Authentication System For Medical Images

In this paper we investigate the watermarking authentication when applied to medical imagery field. We first give an overview of watermarking technology by paying attention to fragile watermarking since it is the usual scheme for authentication. We then analyze the requirements for image authentication and integrity in medical imagery, and we show finally that invertible schemes are the best suited for this particular field. A well known authentication method is studied. This technique is then adapted here for interleaving patient information and message authentication code with medical images in a reversible manner, that is using lossless compression. The resulting scheme enables on a side the exact recovery of the original image that can be unambiguously authenticated, and on the other side, the patient information to be saved or transmitted in a confidential way. To ensure greater security the patient information is encrypted before being embedded into images. Keywords—Medical Imaging, Invertible Watermarking, Authentication, Integrity.