Digital identification tags for medical fundus images for tele-ophthalmology applications

This paper proposes a method of inserting a digital pattern having patient identity in the medical image without tampering the medical information of the image. To attain imperceptible insertion of the digital pattern a frequency domain approach is used in the mid frequency band of the discrete cosine transform. The original medical image and the stego-image is compared and analyzed for all features and also tested for retaining of all features and medical information. Blood vessels have been extracted from the original and stego image and it has been established from experimental results that the features remains unaltered. Texture features also has been analyzed and experimental results indicates that the variation in the texture features is minimal and do not affect the medical information. The correlation of the features extracted is above 0.99 indicating the insertion of the digital pattern did not cause any loss of medical information in the image.