Title: Integer wavelet transform based data hiding scheme for electrocardiogram signals protection

Authors: Moad Med Sayah; Zermi Narima; Khaldi Amine; Kafi Med Redouane

Addresses: Electrical Engineering Laboratory, Department of Electronics, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Kasdi Merbah, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria ' Laboratories of Automation and Signals of Annaba (LASA), Electronics Department, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Badji Mokhtar Annaba University, 23000, Annaba, Algeria ' Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Laboratory (LINATI), Computer Science Department, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Kasdi Merbah, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria ' Electrical Engineering Laboratory, Department of Electronics, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Kasdi Merbah, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria

Abstract: A significant security and protection concern in telemedicine at the moment is how to secure the confidentiality of sensitive data delivered over the Internet and limit access to designated information. In this paper, we propose medical ECG data privacy protection using secure and blind watermarking. The proposed method converts the ECG signal into a 2D image, from which an integer wavelet transform (IWT) is used to recover the frequency information of the image. The obtained coefficient is then filtered using a singular value decomposition (SVD). Given that the primary issue of IWT-based watermarking systems is the lower hiding capacity; this study suggests a safe high capacity IWT-based watermarking scheme for getting this specific constraint. With an average imperceptibility rate of 41 dB, the suggested approach efficiently preserves a significant quality of watermarked signals. According to experiment results on robustness, the watermark is also resistant to the most common watermarking assaults. The suggested scheme offered a normalised cross correlation rate of more than 0.9 on average for all attacks.

Keywords: electrocardiogram signals; digital watermarking; blind watermarking; integer wavelet transform; IWT; singular value decomposition; SVD; QR code.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2024.138419

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2024 Vol.27 No.3, pp.364 - 376

Received: 08 Dec 2022
Accepted: 23 Jun 2023
Published online: 03 May 2024 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article