Medical Image Watermarking

Healthcare institution that handles a number of patients, opinions is often sought from different experts. It demands the exchange of the medical history of the patient among the experts which includes the medical images, prescriptions and electronic patient records (EPR) etc. In order to reduce the storage and transmission cost, data hiding techniques are used to embed patient information within medical images. In medical imaging applications, there are stringent constraints on image fidelity that strictly prohibit any permanent image distortion by the watermarking. Authenticity is another important aspect in medical image watermarking. To overcome the problem of occurrence of artifacts and to produce zero distorted or noise free watermarked medical images; this book presents the technique in which authors used modified difference expansion watermarking using LSB replacement in the difference of virtual border for watermarking of medical images. The Class Dependent Coding Scheme (CDCS) is used to encode the electronic patient record (EPR) data for increasing the embedding capacity. Thus providing new levels to the research in the field of medical image watermarking.