Telemedicine and E-healthcare: A novel watermarking method

Telemedicine is becoming more and more popular since it enables patients to consult doctors in distant areas and receive sickness treatment online. Safely transmitting medical images is one of the most difficult parts of telemedicine. Regions of interest (ROIs) are normally found in medical images. During transmission, an intruder may manipulate the ROI of the image. In this paper, the Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) is used to propose a novel watermarking technique. An image to be communicated is segmented into a region of interest (ROI) and a region of non-interest (RONI). Further, segments the RONI into parts. Embeds the hash code, authentication data, recovery data etc. into the parts of RONI. In the event that the ROI is tampered during transmission of the image, the proposed method excerpts the ROI recovery data from the RONI of the image, verifies it, and recovers the ROI with that data if it is authentic. Based on experimental results, the proposed method is capable of embedding higher data volumes by using NSCT, in addition to recognizing tampered areas in the ROI and recovering it.