SBPG: Secure Better Portable Graphics for Trustworthy Media Communications in the IoT

Smart Healthcare is envisioned as the combination of traditional healthcare augmented by smart bio-sensors, wearable devices, and a plethora of on-body sensors that communicate with smart hospitals, smart emergency response systems, and ambulances, through advanced information and communication technologies. The vision of smart healthcare as part of a smart city relies on the framework of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the underlying core technology that enables the design and operation of a city, whereby smart technology, energy grids, transportation, buildings, communication, and information technology, are all interconnected. This paper addresses some of the challenges faced in the IoT infrastructure, specifically secure communication and user authentication in the context of automated analysis of biomedical images and communication of the analysis results and related metadata in a smart healthcare framework. A hardware architecture for a secure digital camera integrated with the secure better portable graphics (SBPG) compression algorithm, suitable for applications in the IoT, is proposed in this paper. The focus of this paper is on patient data protection and authentication. The proposed SBPG architecture offers two layers of protection, concurrent encryption and watermarking, which address all issues related to security, privacy, and digital rights management. The experimental results demonstrate that the new compression technique BPG outperforms JPEG in terms of compression quality and compressed file size while providing increased image quality. High performance requirements of BPG have been met by employing two techniques: 1) insertion of an encrypted signature in the center portion of the image and 2) frequency-domain watermarking using blockwise DCT of size 8 × 8 pixels. These approaches optimize the proposed architecture by decreasing computational complexity while maintaining strong protection, with concomitant increase of the speed of the watermarking and compression processes. A Simulink® prototype for the proposed architecture has been built and tested. To the best of our knowledge, the hardware architecture for BPG compression with built-in image authentication capability for integration with a secure digital camera is the first one ever proposed.