Open Access

ARTICLE

Robust Reversible Audio Watermarking Scheme for Telemedicine and Privacy Protection

Xiaorui Zhang^1,2,*, Xun Sun¹, Xingming Sun¹, Wei Sun³, Sunil Kumar Jha⁴

1 Engineering Research Center of Digital Forensics, Ministry of Education, Jiangsu Engineering Center of Network Monitoring, School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China
2 Wuxi Research Institute, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Wuxi, 214100, China
3 Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China
4 IT Fundamentals and Education Technologies Applications, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Rzeszow Voivodeship, 100031, Poland

* Corresponding Author: Xiaorui Zhang. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 71(2), 3035-3050. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.022304

Received 02 August 2021; Accepted 03 September 2021; Issue published 07 December 2021

Abstract

The leakage of medical audio data in telemedicine seriously violates the privacy of patients. In order to avoid the leakage of patient information in telemedicine, a two-stage reversible robust audio watermarking algorithm is proposed to protect medical audio data. The scheme decomposes the medical audio into two independent embedding domains, embeds the robust watermark and the reversible watermark into the two domains respectively. In order to ensure the audio quality, the Hurst exponent is used to find a suitable position for watermark embedding. Due to the independence of the two embedding domains, the embedding of the second-stage reversible watermark will not affect the first-stage watermark, so the robustness of the first-stage watermark can be well maintained. In the second stage, the correlation between the sampling points in the medical audio is used to modify the hidden bits of the histogram to reduce the modification of the medical audio and reduce the distortion caused by reversible embedding. Simulation experiments show that this scheme has strong robustness against signal processing operations such as MP3 compression of 48 db, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) of 20 db, low-pass filtering, resampling, re-quantization and other attacks, and has good imperceptibility.

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Citations