SECURE TRANSMISSION OF BIO-MEDICAL DATA USING STEGANOGRAPHY

Abstract

To transmit secret data over the internet, the information should be sent in a way attacker finds it difficult to read the secret data. In this paper patient’s secret information is hidden in the bio-medical signal like ECG/EEG/PPG. The transmitted information generally contains (1) biomedical-signals (2) patient data. Main concerns include privacy and authenticity of the data being transmitted. A secret key is used which is known to sender and receiver. This paper introduces a novel steganography technique that guarantees (1) protection of private data utilizing a key and (2) originality of the bio-medical-signals. To maximize embedding, Fast-Walsh-Hadamard Transform is used to convert the signals into a set of coefficients. The proposed technique can be applied on three bio-medical signals like ECG/EEG/PPG unlike any other technique which uses only one bio-medical signal. To achieve least distortion, coefficients of least significant bit is considered. The algorithm has less impact on the bio-medical signal and the signal at the transmitting side can be recovered with less distortion.