Protection of Ultrasound Image Sequence: Employing Motion Vector Reversible Watermarking

In healthcare information systems, medical data is very important for diagnosis. Most of the health institutions store their patients’ data on third-party servers. Therefore, its security is very important, since the advent of advanced multimedia and communication technology, whereby digital contents are manipulated, copied, and duplicated without leaving any trace. In this paper, a reversible watermarking technique is applied to the patients’ data (ultrasound image sequence). Since the traditional watermarking schemes can experience some permanent distortions that are not acceptable in the medical application. Thus, a reversible watermarking technique has been used, which can not only secure the ultrasound image sequence but also restore the original sequence back. For watermark embedding, the magnitude and phase angles of motion vectors of the image sequence are used that are obtained by using Full-Search block-based motion estimation algorithm. Before applying the motion estimation algorithm and watermark embedding, the histogram pre-processing is performed to avoid underflow/overflow. Unlike other state-of-the-art watermarking schemes that are reported in the last decades, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is simple, provides a much larger embedding capacity and better quality of the watermarked image sequence.

@article{Habib2019,
  title     = {Protection of Ultrasound Image Sequence: Employing Motion Vector Reversible Watermarking},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {4},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Rafi Ullah Habib and Fayez Al-Fayez},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100416},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100416}
}