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Secure transmission and integrity verification for color medical images in telemedicine applications

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Abstract

Medical images became a very important information tool for health professionals. Currently, the medical image acquired in a hospital or an imaging center can be shared among several health professionals to facilitate patient management and improve medical information management. In this work, we proposed a robust and blind watermarking approach to adequately secure medical images exchanged in telemedicine. This approach ensures the traceability and integrity of the medical and essential image for data security in the field of telemedicine. In this approach, the watermark consists of the patient's photography as well as the patient's data and the data related to the medical image acquisition. These combined data will thus guarantee the successful authentication of the image as well as the patient. A hash of this necessary information will be appropriately included in the watermark to ensure the integrity of the hidden data. The proposed watermarking in this approach remains a substitutive process. The frequency content of the image is acquired using transforms. Schur decomposition is then applied to the obtained mid-frequency subbands. Finally, the watermark bits will be substituted to the upper triangular matrix values obtained. Imperceptibility and robustness experimental results show that the proposed methods adequately maintain a significant quality of watermarked images and are remarkably robust against several conventional attacks. Since those schemes offer a reasonable imperceptibility and robustness, they could be useful for copyrights protection of medical images.

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  1. Department of Electronics, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Electrical Engineering Laboratory, University of Kasdi Merbah, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria

    Moad Med Sayah & Kafi Med Redouane

  2. Computer Science Department, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Laboratory (LINATI), University of Kasdi Merbah, 30000, Ouargla, Algeria

    Khaldi Amine

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Sayah, M.M., Redouane, K.M. & Amine, K. Secure transmission and integrity verification for color medical images in telemedicine applications. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 43613–43638 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11791-2

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