JP3D compressed-domain watermarking of still and volumetric medical images

Digital watermarking can be used as data hiding technique to interleave medical images with patient information before transmitting and storing applications. While digital image watermarking and lossy compression methods have been widely studied, much less attention has been paid to their application in medical imaging situations, due partially to speculations on loss in viewer performance caused by degradation of image information. This article describes an hybrid data hiding/compression system, adapted to medical imaging. The central contribution is to integrate blind watermarking, based on turbo trellis-coded quantization, to JP3D encoder. The latter meets conformity condition, with respect to its antecedents JPEG2000 coders. Thus, the watermark embedding can be applied on two-dimensional as well as volumetric images. Results of our method applied to magnetic resonance and computed tomography medical images have shown that our watermarking scheme is robust to JP3D compression attacks and can provide relative high data embedding rate whereas keep a relative lower distortion.