A fragile invertible watermarking technique for the authentication of medical images

This paper deals with a fragile watermarking technique for the authentication of medical images. Medical images are stored in archiving and communication systems that are accessed by the radiologists for diagnosis. The proposed method insure the integrity of the medical image data that is being transferred over public network. Any modification to the watermarked image can be detected using the proposed watermarking method. A unique 14 decimal digits number (signature) representing patient's entry date and file ID embedded inside the patient's medical image in an imperceptible way without increasing the data size that need to be transferred. This signature can be extracted at the radiologist viewer work stations and used for the authentication while the modified data is restored back to original if the image found to be authentic. This kind of erasable embedding process would ensure medical image retrieval without any modification to the image data after the authentication process. The proposed frequency domain watermarking method go along with the unique need of medical images for diagnosis.