A Methodological Evaluation of Crypto-Watermarking System for Medical Images

Health care institution demands exchange of medical images of number of patients to sought opinions from different experts. In order to reduce storage and for secure transmission of the medical images, Crypto-Watermarking techniques are adopted. The system is considered to be combinations of encryption technique with watermarking or steganography means adopted for safe transfer of medical images along with embedding of optional medical information. The Digital Watermarking is the process of embedding data to multimedia content. This can be done in spatial as well as frequency domain of the cover image to be transmitted. The robustness against attacks is ensured while embedding the encrypted data into transform domain, the encrypted data can be any secret key for the content recovery or patient record or the image itself. This chapter presents basic aspects of crypto-watermarking technique, as an application. It gives a detailed assessment on different approaches of crypto-watermarking for secure transmission of medical images and elaborates a case study on it.