A MIMO SFBC OFDM scheme for transmission of watermarked medical images over frequency-selective fading channels

Digital watermarking is a technique adapted to embed patient information as watermark with medical images to reduce storage and transmission overheads. A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme in which multiple antennas are used in both transmitter and receiver has emerged as one of the most significant technical breakthroughs in modern wireless communications. This paper presents a MIMO SFBC OFDM scheme for transmission of watermarked medical images over frequency-selective fading channels and its performance is analyzed in comparison with SISO-OFDM using MMSE V-BLAST based detection at the receiver. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is illustrated with implementation results on two watermarked medical images.