Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21ONG-ART; 978-0-7381-1183-4

2021 Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV) | 978-1-6654-1960-4/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICICV50876.2021.9388616

A HYBRID OF WATERMARK SCHEME WITH

ENCRYPTION TO IMPROVE SECURITY OF
MEDICAL IMAGES
Shankar A1
Kannammal A2
Department of Electronics and Communication
Department of Electronics and Communication
Engineering,
Engineering,
Sri Ramakrishna Institute of Technology,
P.S.G College of Technology, Coimbatore
Coimbatore
kannammal_a@yahoo.com
shankar1611@gmail.com

Providing high security. Further decryption process is

Abstract: With the recent research and development
in the areas of communication, traditional diagnosis is
being replaced by e-diagnosis in healthcare industry
like teleconsulting, telesurgery and telediagnosis. The
requirement of these applications is to exchange the
medical images in 1s and 0s to another location in a
secured manner. In this work, both robust and
reversible watermarking is done and a three level
security is provided. The medical image is divides into
two major parts with giving importance to diagnose
identification namely region of interest (ROI) and
region of non-interest (RONI).Firstly
Reversible data embedding, which embeds payload data
in reversible manner in to binary image, since it is
considered to be important by physician for making
diagnosis. Therefore no changes are made in ROI image
during watermarking. Secondly in RONI, Robust
watermarking is done, so that it can withstand various
intentional and unintentional attacks. In ROI region a
two level decomposition is done by Haar wavelet and a
watermark (patient’s information seen on header) is
embedded into LH1 and HL1 sub bands. Later, both
watermarked images are combined and a single
watermarked image is obtained. Thirdly, the resultant
image is further processed by using AES algorithm
which makes output image in an unreadable form, thus
done to retrieve the original image.
KEYWORDS: Watermarking, AES, Encryption,
Decryption, Payload
1 INTRODUCTION
With the vite progress in media and technology in
various sectors, Major challenge is there to protect
the copyright of products from the unauthorized
person. In general watermarking plays a major role to
overcome [1, 2, 3] this issue though it may suffer
in ROI
with various distortions like compression noise etc., it
should to manipulated in such a way that the
algorithm wants to be more accurate and robust. In
recent decade the research has been focus on this area
to improvise [1, 6, 8] this issue and it can be in either
Spatial or Transform domain. here also has a new
work [4] based on blind multiple which uses LWT(
lifting wavelet transform) and Arnold chaotic which
is very effective in the recent research. Further bulk
data in the form of digital acquired digital medical
images used in hospitals are usually stored in
database with required information (Text).

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21ONG-ART; 978-0-7381-1183-4

2 LITERATURE SURVEY In the proposed work, a three level security is

The nonblind watermarking scheme [10] gives the
results of in which the original image is needed in the
watermark extraction phase. It has been found that
the medical images provide more robustness to
attacks when wavelet based watermarking is done in
it.Further capability of revealing singularities [7] in
images for wavelet and performance
corresponding wavelet-based watermarking
analyzed and Tensor product can reveal the
singularities in the three directions .The reversible
watermarking done in ROI region of the medical
image [9,10]. It has been reinforced through
extensive research that the most crucial regions of
medical images must not be degraded
compressed by a lossless or near lossless algorithm.
The method to find significant difference of an
image. Every seven non-overlap wavelet coefficients
of the host image are grouped into a block. The
largest two coefficients in a block are called
significant coefficients and their difference is called
significant difference[6,8,10]. Based upon the newly
constructed nontensor product wavelet banks, a
watermarking scheme based upon
differences in DNWT is proposed (SD-DNWT).
[5] gave a new method in which both robust and
reversible watermarking is done. Since ROI region is
important for diagnosis purpose,
watermarking is used in it, so that the watermark
embedded can be exactly extracted. Similarly in
RONI region, robust watermarking is used and hence
it can withstand various attacks. Therefore this
method provides an improved security than others.
provided for medical images. Initially reversible
watermarking is done in ROI Image; robust
watermarking is done in RONI Image. Later, both
images are combined to obtain a single watermarked
image. This watermarked image is then encrypted by
using AES encryption. This method provides a higher
of the security than the existing method.
is 3 PROPOSED WATERMARKING
ALGORITHM
The Proposed work is divided into three modules.
Firstly The Given medical image is separated as ROI
and RONI and then Embedding technique in
reversible method is utilized. Secondly the RONI
with haar wavelet (tensor wavelet) is used later both
and
watermarked images are combined and a single
watermarked image is obtained which is then
encrypted using AES algorithm to provide high
security.
3.1ROI WATERMARKING
Reversible watermarking is performed in
ROI region, which is considered to be important by
physician for making diagnosis. Usage of classical
watermarking techniques may create distortion and
significant
consequently the diagnosis value of image may be
lost. Hence, in this paper, Tian’s difference
expansion method is used. Here, a data (payload)
which is invisible is embedded in a reversible way to
reversible
the ROI region. In hiding the information, reversible
data embedding method which hides the information
in medical image is one of the best method by
which owner can decode the hidden information and
can restore it easy. Further the performance can be
measured in Visual quality and Complexity.
Payload

ROI Reversible
Extracted Image
Image Watermarking
Original
Medical Image
Watermarked Encryption Decryption
Image (AES)

RONI Robust
Image Watermarking

Patients
Information
227
Fig. 1 Block diagram of the proposed method

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21ONG-ART; 978-0-7381-1183-4

Here, Difference expansion (DE) technique is computational complexity is reduced

employed to embed method for medical image. The
3.2RONI WATERMARKING
Robust watermarking is done in RONI
region, which should be able to withstand various
attacks. The watermark used here is patient’s
information. Similarly hospital logo, index, EPR can
also be used. The Proposed embedding technique and
recovering procedure is as follows,
Watermark Embedding
a) Apply two level forward 2D Haar
wavelet transform on RONI image to
get the (LL1, HL1, LH1, HH1) Sub-
images by wavelet decomposition
method.
b) The LH1 and HL1 sub-images are
chosen for embedding the watermark.
c) Convert the watermark into binary
format and each bit of the data is
implanted in each pixel of the LH1 and
HL1 sub-images by using
watermarking.
d) The watermarked LH1 and HL1 sub-
images are replaced in its original
position.
e) Then inverse 2D Haar
transform is applied to attain the
watermarked image.
Watermark Extraction
f) Apply two level forward 2D Haar
wavelet transform on watermarked
image to get the (LL1, HL1, LH1, and
HH1) sub-images.
g) The LH1 and HL1 sub-images are
chosen to extract the embedded
watermark.
h) Perform inverse LSB watermarking
algorithm to extract the watermark.
The robust watermarking method proposed is
designed to survive intentional and unintentional
attacks. This method is based on wavelet coefficient
properties of the ROI, where features are extracted
based on absolute differences between corresponding
coefficients in the LH1 and HL1 subbands on 8x8
blocks.
3.3AES ENCRYPTION/DECRYPTION
After combining ROI watermarked image and RONI
watermarked image, a watermarked image is
obtained. AES algorithm comprising of ten rounds
LSB and each round has four steps is used in this method
[8]. AES encryption technique is much faster than
public key encryption (RSA), often by 100 to 1,000
times because public key encryption places a much
heavier computational load on computer processors
wavelet than symmetric key encryption. It is possible to speed
up execution of this cipher by combining Sub Bytes
and Shift Rows with Mix columns, and transforming
them into a sequence of table lookups. Symmetric
key technology is generally used to provide secrecy
for the bulk encryption and decryption of
information.

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
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5 Simulation results
Using the same watermarking and encryption method as above, the following simulation results are obtained from
which the performance measures are made.
5.1 Selection of ROI and RONI Images

Fig. 2 a) Original Image b) Selection of ROI and RONI Images c) ROI Image d) RONI Image

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP21ONG-ART; 978-0-7381-1183-4

5.2 ROI Watermarking and RONI Watermarking

Payload

a b c d e f
Fig 3 a) ROI Image b) watermarked ROI Image c) RONI Image d) One-level decomposed image using Haar wavelet
e) Watermark f) Watermarked RONI Image

230
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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
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5.3 AES ENCRYPTION & DECRYPTION

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Fig 4 . a) Final Watermarked Image b) Encrypted Image c) Decrypted Image d) Extracted watermark

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 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Communication Technologies and Virtual Mobile Networks (ICICV 2021).
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6 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The Performance of the proposed watermarking watermark embedded and extracted are the same.
algorithm is evaluated by the various Quality PSNR value is also considerably good in all cases by
measures Table 2 gives the quality measures of the using tensor wavelet (Haar wavelet transform) than
proposed method. Encryption can be done either by nontensor wavelet.
using stream cipher or block cipher. Here encryption 7 CONCLUSIONS
is done by using AES algorithm which is a block
The proposed Watermarking and Encryption
cipher, and it offers high security. PSNR value is
algorithm provides a three level security for medical
above 40dB which shows that the algorithm is
images .Initially watermarking is done to ROI Image,
lossless. Similarly NC value is evaluated between the
and then to RONI Image, later these two images are
embedded and extracted watermark. SSIM is
combined to obtain a single watermarked image.
calculated for original and decrypted image and it
Since ROI Image is important for diagnosis purpose,
gives the similarity value between these two images.
reversible watermarking is done in it. Similarly,
Table 2 Quality measures for the proposed algorithm RONI Image should be more robust to attacks and
hence robust watermarking is done by using wavelet
Medical Tensor wavelet (haar wavelet) Non- transforms. Finally, the watermarked image is again
tensor encrypted to increase the security of the medical
Images
wavelet
PSN NC SSIM Encry Decry PSNR image. Now the image which is in unreadable form is
R ption ption (dB) transmitted to the required person. The robustness of
(dB) Time Time the watermarks was not affected by common attacks
(S) (S) in future work.

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