Privacy Protection of Patient Medical Images using Digital Watermarking Technique for E-healthcare System

Background: Privacy protection has been a critical issue in the delivery of medical images for telemedicine, e-health care and other remote medical systems.

Objectives: The aim of this proposed work is to implement a secure, reversible, digital watermarking technique for the transmission of medical data remotely in health care systems.

Methods: In this research work, we employed a novel optimized digital watermarking scheme using discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition using cuckoo search algorithm based on Lévy flight for embedding watermark into the grayscale medical images of the patient. The performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated on four different 256 × 256 grayscale host medical images and a 32 × 32 binary logo image.

Results: The performance of the proposed scheme in terms of peak signal to noise ratio was remarkably high, with an average of 55.022dB compared to other methods.

Conclusion: Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is capable of achieving superior performance compared to some of the state-of-art schemes in terms of robustness, security and high embedding capacity which is required in the field of telemedicine and e-health care system.