Review of Transform Domain Medical Image Watermarking Techniques

Nowadays, to enhance patient care and streamline the management of medical information, medical images obtained in hospitals or imaging centers can be readily shared among multiple healthcare professionals. However, this sharing often takes place over insecure networks, exposing medical images to various security threats where attackers aim to manipulate, steal, or destroy sensitive information, any variation to the medical record might result in an incorrect diagnosis and hence harm the patient's life. This highlights the increased need for security measures to ensure confidentiality, availability, and reliability, which encompass integrity and authenticity. Watermarking techniques have emerged as a popular and effective means of protecting patient data from these attacks and problems. Watermarking techniques exhibit a range of categorizations, encompassing factors such as their classification based on robustness, imperceptibility, capacity, and the transform domain. Transform domain watermarking techniques have garnered significant interest due to their ability to offer a high level of robustness against attacks, all while ensuring the imperceptibility of the watermark. In this review, we explore a variety of transform domain watermarking techniques specifically designed for medical images. Additionally, we provide a comparative analysis of different kinds of transform domains commonly employed in medical image watermarking.