A Novel Fractional Discrete Cosine Transform Based Reversible Watermarking for Biomedical Image Applications

Digital watermarking is a good tool for healthcare information management systems. The well-known Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) based watermarking has its limitations as the host image will be destroyed, however, the recovery of biomedical image is essential to avoid misdiagnosis. A transparent yet reversible watermarking algorithm is required for biomedical image applications. In this paper, we propose a fractional discrete cosine transform (FDCT) based watermarking to exactly reconstruct the host image. Experimental results show that the FDCT based watermarking is preferable to the QIM based watermarking for the biomedical image applications.