Medical Video Watermarking Scheme for Telemedicine Applications

Recent advancements in a new era of e-health and telemedicine technologies present newer opportunities for sharing medical data when an open communication channel is used. However, this exchange is facing critical challenges of copyright protection, content authentication, and integrity verification. Therefore, due to the high demand for safe manipulation of patient's medical information, digital watermarking is required, as a value-added tool, for secure medical data management. In this study, a new reversible watermarking technique for the security of medical videos is proposed. The patient identity is embedded, as a watermark, into the host medical videos. An algorithm is adopted for selecting the optimal frames in each video shot. This approach includes the use of polynomial transform methods, in order to identify the best watermark embedding areas in the optimal frames. Experimental results demonstrate high imperceptibility of the watermark and strong robustness against different attacks. Hence, our algorithm validates the security measures that ensure an effective manipulation of medical videos.