Formal Concept Analysis to Improve Robustness on Medical Image Watermarking Schemes in the Spatial Domain

• Published in: International journal of computer science and information security 2016-02, Vol.14 (2), p.261-261
• Main Authors: AlShaikh, Muath, Nana, Laurent, Laouamer, Lamri, Christine, Anca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Complexity; Computer information security; Computer Science; Copyright; Copyrights; Digital watermarks; Headers; Medical imaging; Robustness; Telemedicine; Watermarking
• ISSN: 1947-5500; 1947-5500

Digital medical image plays an important role in the field of Telemedicine, but patient privacy and other security issues are still coming under threats from unauthorized users. Watermarking has become essential and required for proving the identity of the owner, as well as authorizing use of images and also protecting copyrighted material from illegal access. Authorizing use and copyright protection as parameters of an image, especially of a medical image, are strongly related to robustness and complexity, imperceptibility and capacity as parameters of watermarking. Medical images have a special structure which comprises header and body blocks. The region of non interest (NROI) in the body of a medical image is the most suitable area for embedding watermark to prevent the degradation of the medical image. In our paper, we propose a novel watermarking approach in the spatial domain, based on formal concept analysis (FCA). FCA finds the optimal position for watermark embedding in NROI of the medical image. Our watermark is built from some existing information in the DICOM header (IODs). Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach would offer us high robustness with less complexity, imperceptible embedding and low payload compared with the existing watermarking approaches.