Blind lossless medical image watermarking in the DOST domain using difference expansion

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the use of the Discrete Orthogonal Stockwell Transform (DOST) by introducing a blind reversible and fragile medical image watermarking (MIW) method for image integrity checking. 2D DOST is first applied to the host image, the watermark is inserted in the high frequency coefficients based on the Difference Expansion (DE) technique. The extraction process provides host image retrieval after watermark removal. Experimental results show that the method achieved a high visual quality for marked images resulting in a better compromise between fidelity a nd capacity.