Secret sharing based watermarking for copy-protection and ownership control of medical Image

Medical data transmission and sharing, especially during this COVID-19 pandemic period, on the open channel have become more important for remote diagnosis and treatment purpose. However, the alteration and unauthorized distribution of image data has become easier, and thus the big issue of copy-protection and ownership conflicts has attracted more attention for healthcare research community. Further, large amount of confidential and personal medical records is often stored on cloud environments. However, outsourcing medical data possibly brings the great security and privacy issue, since the confidential records are shared to the third party. In this paper, a robust X-Ray image watermarking is proposed by using Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and Multiresolution Singular Value Decomposition (MSVD). For watermark embedding, the maximum entropy component of X-Ray carrier image is firstly decomposed using NSCT. Then, low and high frequency details of carrier and mark image is obtained using MSVD. Further, conceal the watermark detail through modifying the detail of carrier image via the suitable factor. Finally, Shamir's (k, n) secret sharing algorithm is employed to obtain secure marked carrier image. Objective evaluations on 200 X-Ray images of COVID-19 patients demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has not only an excellent invisibility but a strong robustness against the various attacks. The results also show that our algorithm outperforms the related image watermarking algorithms, since it is also suitable for applications in the multi-cloud.