Open Access

ARTICLE

A Robust Data Hiding Reversible Technique for Improving the Security in e-Health Care System

Saima Kanwal¹, Feng Tao^1,*, Ahmad Almogren², Ateeq Ur Rehman³, Rizwan Taj¹, Ayman Radwan⁴
1 School of Computer and Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou, 730050, China
2 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, 11633, Saudi Arabia
3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Government College University, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan
4 Instituto de Telecomunicações and Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, 3810-193, Portugal
* Corresponding Author: Feng Tao. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2023, 134(1), 201-219. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2022.020255

Received 13 November 2021; Accepted 28 March 2022; Issue published 24 August 2022

Abstract

The authenticity and integrity of healthcare is the primary objective. Numerous reversible watermarking schemes have been developed to improve the primary objective but increasing the quantity of embedding data leads to covering image distortion and visual quality resulting in data security detection. A trade-off between robustness, imperceptibility, and embedded capacity is difficult to achieve with current algorithms due to limitations in their ability. Keeping this purpose insight, an improved reversibility watermarking methodology is proposed to maximize data embedding capacity and imperceptibility while maintaining data security as a primary concern. A key is generated by a random path with minimum bit flipping is selected in the 4 × 4 block to gain access to the data embedding patterns. The random path’s complex structure ensures data security. Data of various sizes (8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB) are used to analyze image imperceptibility and evaluate quality factors. The proposed reversible watermarking methodology performance is tested under standard structures PSNR, SSIM, and MSE. The results revealed that the MRI watermarked images are imperceptible, like the cover image when LSB is 3 bits plane. Our proposed reversible watermarking methodology outperforms other related techniques in terms of average PSNR (49.29). Experiment results show that the suggested reversible watermarking method improves data embedding capacity and imperceptibility compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

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Keywords

Medical images security; data hiding; LSB matching; hiding capacity; imperceptibility

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