An edge based blind watermarking technique of medical images without devalorizing diagnostic parameters

At present most of the hospitals and diagnostic centers globally, have started using wireless media for exchanging biomedical information (Electronic Patient Report or hospital logo) for mutual availability of therapeutic case studies. The required level of security and authenticity for transmitting biomedical information through the internet is quite high. Level of security can be increased; authenticity of the information can be verified by adding ownership data as the watermark in the original information. In our proposed work, watermark is added in the edges, i.e. the boundaries between the Region of Interest (ROI) and the Region of Non-Interest (RONI) in the biomedical image. Our proposed method of adding watermark in the edges of the images is most effectual for those medical images which are resultant of such imaging processes which has edge detection as one of the essential intermediate part of the process. Canny edge based watermarking technique is applied on three different medical images: IVUS image, retinal vascular tree image, CT Scan image and the correlation values of the original watermark image and the extracted watermark image are calculated to show the level of acceptability of the proposed technique. The efficacy of the proposed method claims robustness against most common attacks.