Title: Combining watermarking and encryption algorithm for medical image safe transfer: method based on DCT

Authors: Sondes Ajili; Mohamed Ali Hajjaji; Abdellatif Mtibaa

Addresses: Laboratory of E?E, Faculty of Sciences of Monastir, Physics Department, University of Monastir, Monastir, Tunisia ' Laboratory of E?E, Faculty of Sciences of Monastir, Physics Department, University of Monastir, Monastir, Tunisia ' National Engineering School of Monastir (ENIM), University of Monastir, Monastir, Tunisia

Abstract: A novel method for watermarking and encryption of medical image based on the DCT is presented. Medical data, such as the patients' private information is embedded into the corresponding medical image. After that, the watermarked medical images are encrypted by using the AES and the RSA encryption Algorithm to increase the robustness. Our method uses the standard JPEG compression for the embedding of patients' private data. The insertion block is inserted just after the DCT phase. To control identification and eventually the correction of the watermark, it should be noted that we used the serial turbo code to recover the data inserted. The proposed system is tested against several attacks, such as compression, noises, filtering and geometric transformation. Experiments and analyses show that low distortion and high robustness have been achieved in the process of watermarking, and, at the same time, elevated security has been acquired in the encryption phase.

Keywords: DCT; discrete cosine transform; watermarking; serial turbocode; robustness; AES; RSA; medical images; SHA-1; encryption algorithms; cryptography; image transfer; patient data; privacy protection; privacy preservation; image security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2016.078269

International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, 2016 Vol.9 No.4/5, pp.242 - 251

Received: 23 May 2015
Accepted: 05 Mar 2016
Published online: 10 Aug 2016 *

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