Enhanced medical image watermarking using hybrid DWT-HMD-SVD and Arnold scrambling.

Abstract

The protection of medical images against unauthorized access and tampering is paramount. This paper presents a robust watermarking framework that integrates Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Hessenberg Decomposition (HMD), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Arnold Scrambling to enhance the security of medical images. By applying DWT to decompose the medical image into frequency subbands and embedding the watermark into the most significant subband, the proposed algorithm ensures minimal impact on image quality. HMD simplifies the subband matrix, while SVD extracts and manipulates the essential features of the image. Arnold Scrambling is employed to further secure the watermark image before embedding. Experimental results on various medical image datasets demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness in maintaining imperceptibility, with a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of up to 49 dB, and robustness against common image processing attacks, such as compression and noise addition. The proposed scheme achieves a balance between imperceptibility and robustness, making it suitable for securing medical images in digital environments. The proposed scheme has been implemented on different medical datasets and the performance is evaluated in terms of its imperceptibility and robustness. The PSNR value achieved by the proposed work is 49 dB which proves that the embedded watermark image is imperceptible while the NC value achieved is higher than 0.9 against most of the attacks, hence proves its robustness against multiple attacks.