Cost-Effective Watermarking Scheme for Authentication of Digital Fundus Images in Healthcare Data Management

Abstract

This paper presents a cost-effective watermarking scheme for the authentication of healthcare data management. The digital fundus images are one particular class of medical images and it is widely used for screening mass population, identifying early symptoms of various diseases in healthcare. The mass volume of such data and its management requires an effective authentication scheme, while it is exchanged on an open network. The proposed scheme uses a watermarking technique to authenticate the digital fundus images. The watermark is generated concerning the portions of the original image using Singular value decomposition (SVD) and the remaining portions are used for embedding. The embedding process uses interleaving concepts across the red and blue planes of the original images to make the number of embedding as constant. The constant number of embedding is fixed for the original size of the given image to make the scheme as computationally cost-effective. The experiment showed the maximum capacity of the proposed scheme is 329960 bits for an image of size 565x584x3. It modifies 43% of the total number of embedded pixels against jittering attacks at an average. Comparative analysis showed that the proposed scheme uses only 1/3 of the original image size for embedding by retaining good imperceptibility of 54 dB. The net performance of the proposed scheme is found to be constant and it makes a scheme as cost-effective.