Medical image watermarking technique based on polynomial decomposition

To date, the exchange and storage of medical data on electronic format are subject to potential risks. Hence, considerations of security and copyright protection of medical images are necessary and unavoidable. In such a situation, a watermarking scheme is proposed as one of the most promising methods to provide security, reliability, and authenticity of medical information. In this work, we propose a new region based medical image watermarking, which consists of embedding numerical information, called a watermark, into the original image. The main originality of this scheme is the use of the polynomial transform to decompose an image into two parts: the structure and the texture components. This mathematical model is used to extract the most relevant embedding areas, containing less information required for diagnosis. The texture component is selected for embedding the watermark so as to preserve fidelity to the original medical image. Compared with the state-of-the-art schemes, experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme can achieve a good compromise with regard to the invisibility and robustness of the watermark.