You are on page 1of 13

Pir Mehr Ali Shah

Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi


Synopsis for MS (CS) Degree in Computer Science TITLE: EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL IMAGE WATERMARKING TECHNIQUES ON MEDICAL IMAGES

Name of Student: Registration Number: Date of Admission: Date of Initiation: Probable Duration:

Saddam Hussain 02-arid-857 October 2009 21st June, 2010 One year

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE

i)

Supervisor

Dr. Ayyaz Hussain

ii)

Member

Mr. Muhammad Amjad Iqbal

iii)

Member

Director, University Institute of Information Technology

Director, Advanced Studies

ABSTRACT

Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into a digital image in such a way that it is difficult to remove. The aim of watermarking is to include subliminal information in a multimedia document to ensure a security service or simply a labeling application. It would be then possible to recover the embedded message at any time, even if the document was altered by one or more non-destructive attacks, whether malicious or not. An application of watermarking is in copyright protection systems, which are intended to prevent or deter unauthorized copying of digital media. Watermarking in medical images is a new area of research and some works in this area have been reported worldwide recently. Most of the works are on the tamper detection of the images and embedding of the Electronics Patient Record (EPR) data in the medical images. Watermarked medical images can be used transmission, storage or telediagnosis. EPR data hiding in images improves the confidentiality of the patient data, saves memory storage space and reduce the bandwidth requirement for transmission of images. I will present the impact of various watermarking techniques on medical images.

INTRODUCTION

Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into a digital signal in a way that is difficult to remove. In visible watermarking, the information is visible in the picture or video. Typically, the information is text or a logo which identifies the owner of the media. In invisible watermarking, information is added as digital data to audio, picture or video, but it cannot be perceived as such (although it may be possible to detect that some amount of information is hidden). The watermark may be intended for widespread use and is thus made easy to retrieve or it may be a form of steganography, where a party communicates a secret message embedded in the digital signal. The use of the word of watermarking is derived from the much older notion of placing a visible watermark on paper.

The information to be embedded is called a digital watermark, although in some contexts the phrase digital watermark means the difference between the watermarked signal and the cover signal. The signal where the watermark is to be embedded is called the host signal. A watermarking system is usually divided into three distinct steps, embedding, attack and detection. In embedding, an algorithm accepts the host and the data to be embedded and produces a watermarked signal.

Watermarking patient data in the medical image has become an interesting topic recently among the researchers. Though the watermarking is originally proposed for authentication of the images, the technology is adapted for hiding the EPR in it. Almost

all the earlier works in medical image watermarking focused mainly on two areas; 1. tamper detection and authentication and 2. embedding EPR in medical images. Tamper detection watermarks are used for the probable manipulations done by the hostile people. Embedding of EPR in medical images will save storage space of the Hospital Information System (HIS), enhance confidentiality of the patient data, avoid detachment of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) data from the image and save bandwidth for transmission [14, 15, 16, 17].

Authentication, integration and confidentiality are the most important issues concerned with EPR data exchange through internet [18, 19]. All these requirements can be achieved using suitable watermarks. The three requirements of general watermarks (robustness, imperceptibility and capacity) are of specific importance to medical images also. Since the medical images have region of interest (ROI), achieving the above requirements without adversely affecting the ROI is a real challenge to the researchers.

Coatrieux et al [20] asserts the relevance of the watermarking in medical images. Though Piva et al [21] made a general analysis of watermarking techniques in medical imaging, they have not done an exhaustive search and discussion on different algorithms presented recently. This paper makes a search on different works done in MIW context. It will be of immense use for the researchers to understand the state of the art technology in this field.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE
The early work on digital image copyright protection has focused on the creation of a secure and robust watermark only. These works are mainly concerned about the algorithmic watermark issues and they only touch the deployment problems marginally.

Available digital watermarking techniques can be categorized into one of the two domains, viz., spatial and transform, according to the embedding domain of the host image [2]. Least Significant Substitution (LSB) is a simplest technique in the spatial domain [3,4]. In LSB technique, the watermark is embedded by replacing the least significant bits of the image data with a bit of the watermark data. There are many variants of this technique. The data hiding capacity of these algorithms is high. However, these algorithms are hardly robust for various attacks and prone to tamper by unauthorized users.

Correlation based approach [2, 5] is another spatial domain technique in which the watermark is converted to a PN sequence which is then weighted & added to the host image with a gain factor k. For detection, the watermark image is correlated with the watermark image. Watermarking in transform domain is more secure and robust to various attacks.

However, the size of the watermark that can be embedded is generally 1/16 of the host image. Image watermarking algorithms using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) [6,7], Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) [8,9,10], Singular Value Decomposition

(SVD) [11] are available in the literature. The basic philosophy in majority of the transform domain watermarking schemes is to modify transform coefficients based on the bits in watermark image. Most of the domain transformation watermarking schemes works with DCT and DWT. However Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is one of the most powerful numerical analysis techniques and used in various applications [12,13].

There are two major issues with Chang et al.s method. The first one is, the watermark extraction is not complete. The error rate between the original watermark and extracted watermark is not zero. It is very close to zero. That means, the Normalized correlation coefficient is not 1. If perfect extraction is required, robustness has to be sacrificed. Both robustness and perfect extraction (zero error rate) cannot be achieved simultaneously.

The second issue is in the process of complex block selection. A block is said to be a complex block if the blocks diagonal matrix contains more number of non zero coefficients. It has been observed that for majority of the blocks, the number of non-zero coefficients is same. So, it is difficult to identify a block as complex block based on the number of non-zero coefficients in the diagonal matrix of the block in the host image.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A watermarking method is referred to as spread-spectrum if the marked signal is obtained by an additive modification. Spread-spectrum watermarks are known to be modestly robust, but also to have a low information capacity due to host interference. A watermarking method is said to be of quantization type if the marked signal is obtained by quantization. Quantization watermarks suffer from low robustness, but have a high information capacity due to rejection of host interference. A watermarking method is referred to as amplitude modulation if the marked signal is embedded by additive modification which is similar to spread spectrum method but is particularly embedded in the spatial domain.

We will be introducing a new adaptive scheme for the impact of different watermarking techniques on medical images. The goal of the proposed scheme is not only to find the impact of the different watermarking techniques on medical images but also to find the comparison of the impact of the techniques of watermarking. The algorithm or the techniques that are to be used can be classified into two. 1) tamper detection and authentication and 2) EPR data hiding. Tamper detection watermarks are able to locate the regions or pixels of the image where tampering was done. Authentication watermarks are used to identify the source of image. EPR data hiding techniques gives more importance in hiding high payload data in the images keeping the imperceptibility very high.

We also exhort the need of an exclusive benchmarking for MIW. We will discuss the application of MIW, the advantages and the need of MIW. We will describe the requirements of MIW, attacks on watermarked images benchmarking requirements and watermarking algorithms.

PROPOSED APPROACH

We will be introducing a new adaptive scheme for the impact of different watermarking techniques on medical images. The aim of the proposed approach is to find out the impact of different watermarking techniques and algorithms on medical images and also we will be comparing the impacts of different techniques and algorithms on medical images.

If a watermarking system is to be used for a particular application, there must be a standard mechanism for the evaluation of the system Benchmark involves examining a set of mutually dependent performance factors. But there are no universally accepted performance measures applicable for every watermarking system. This calls for a benchmark exclusively for medical image watermarking. In addition to the existing evaluation parameters(visual quality, robustness, capacity) medical image watermarking evaluation must include region of interest in the medical image as another parameter. The robustness of the system must be checked against all the possible transmission and storage attacks. Rather than performing the evaluation on images of different formats, the medical image format can be confined to the DICOM standard. The EPR diffusion into medical images requires more concentration into the capacity of data hiding without affecting visual quality of the image.

The evaluation of imperceptibility of the mark must consider the properties of Human Visual System. The security of the system is dependent on the watermarking key

and the performance evaluation of the system must be done by varying the embedding strength and different type of keys. The delay encountered during embedding and recovery of the watermark is also an important factor in telemedicine applications.

10

LITERATURE CITED

[1]

N.F. Johnson and S.C.Katezenbeisser, A survey of steganographic techniques in Information Techniques for steganography and digital watermarking, Eds. Northwood, Artech House, December 1999.

[2]

Mohamed Kallel and Mohamed Salim Bouhlel and Jean-Christophe Lapayre Improved Tians Method for Medical Image Reversible Watermarking GVIP Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp.1-5, 2007.

[3]

C.I.Podilchuk and E.J.Delp, Digital Watermarking: Algorithms and Applications, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, pp.33-46, July 2001.

[4]

I.J.Cox, M.L.Miller, and J.A. Bloom, Digital Watermarking, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2002.

[5]

Mehul, S. Raval and Priti P. Scalar Quantization Based Multiple Patterns Data Hiding Technique for Gray Scale Images, GVIP Journal, Volume 5, Issue 9, pp.55-61, December 2005.

[6]

Barni, F. Bartolini and A. Piva. A DCT domain system for robust image watermarking. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 66, 357-372, 1998.

[7]

W.C.Chu, DCT based image watermarking using sub sampling. IEEE Trans Multimedia 5, 34-38, 2003.

[8]

M.Barni, M., Bartolini, F., V., Piva, A., Improved wavelet based watermarking through pixel-wise masking. IEEE Trans Image Processing 10, 783- 791, 2001.

11

[9]

Y. Wang, J.F.Doherty and R.E.Van Dyck, A wavelet based watermarking algorithm for ownership verification of digital images, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 11, No.2, pp.77-88, February 2002.

[10]

Karras D.A. A Second Order Spread Sprectrum Modulation Scheme for Wavelet Based Low Error Probability Digital Image Watermarking., GVIP Journal, Volume 5, Issue 3, February 2005.

[11]

Chin-Chen Chang, Piyu Tsai and Chia-Chen Lin, 2005 SVD based digital image watermarking scheme. Pattern Recognition Letters 26, 1577- 1586, 2005.

[12]

H.C.Andrews and C.L.Patterson, Singular value Decomposition (SVD) Image Coding,Hiding IEEE Transactions on Communications 24(4), April 1976, pp.425432.

[13]

P.Waldemar and T.A.Ramstad, Hybrid KLT-SVD Image Compression, IEEE International Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Vol.4, Munich, Germany, April 21-24, 1997, pp.2713- 2716, 1997.

[14]

Ingemar J. Cox, Matthew L. Miller, Jefrey A. Bloom, Digital watermarking, (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 340 Pine Street, Sixth floor, Sans Francisco, CA, USA, 2004) Image Processing,

[15]

Rajendra Acharya U., U. C. Niranjan, S.S. Iyengar, N. Kannathal, Lim Choo Min Simultaneous storage of patient information with medical images in the frequency domain, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Vol. 76, 2004, pp.13-19.

12

[16]

H. Munch, U. Englemann, A. Schroter, H.P. Meinzer The integration of medical images with the patient record and their web based distribution Journal of Academic Radiolog, 11(6), June 2004, 1995, pp.661-668.

[17]

Rajendra Acharya U., P. Subhanna Bhat,

Sathish Kumar, Lim Choo Min,

Transmission and storage of medical images with patient information, Journal of Computers in Biology and Medicine,.33, 2003, pp.303-310. [18] Hui-Mei chao, Chin-Ming Hsu, Ahaou-Gang Miaou, A data hiding technique with authentication, integration and confidentiality for electronic patient records, IEEE trans. Inf. Tech. in biomedicine, 6(1), March 2002, 46-53. [19] Dan Yu, Farook Sathar, Kai-Kuang Ma Watermark detection and extraction using independent component analysis, EURASIP J. on Applied Signal Processing 2002, 92-104. [20] Coatrieux G, H. Maitre, B. Sankur, Y. Rolland, R. collorec, Relevance of watermarking in medical imaging, Proc. IEEE EMBS int. conf. on Inf. Tech. applications in Bio-medicine, 2000,250-255. [21] Alessandro Piva, Franco Bartolini, Iuve Coppini, Alessia De Rosa, Elena Tamburini, Analysis of data hiding technologies for medical images, Proceedings of SPIE-IS&T Electronic Imaging, SPIE Vol. 5020 (2003).

13

You might also like