A Survey on Watermarking Techniques, Requirements, Applications for Medical Images

Medical images are often transmitted over insecure channel. Telemedicine enables medical diagnosis and patient care using modern medical equipments. These equipments generate huge volume of data every day. Hence protection of medical image is very crucial. Many approaches like encryption, digital signature, watermarking etc are spotted in the literature. Watermarking in medical images is commonly used for content authentication, effective data distribution and management, storage, security, safe archiving, controlled access retrieval and captioning. The objective of this paper is to present a survey and compare emerging techniques for protection of medical images through watermarking. Various aspects of medical image watermarking are discussed in this paper including classification and performance measures used in recent research. Finally the paper reviews and remarks about the state of the art and compare some recent works on watermarking.