Watermark and Cryptography of Medical Images for Content Authentication

Medical images are often transmitted over insecure channel. Telemedicine enables medical diagnosis and Patient care using modern medical equipment’s. These equipment’s generate huge volume of data every day. Hence protection of medical image is very crucial. Many approaches like encryption, digital signature, watermarking etc. are spotted in the literature. Watermarking in medical images is commonly used for content authentication, effective data distribution and management, storage, security, safe archiving, controlled access retrieval, and captioning. Medical image is usually comprised of the region of interest (ROI) and non region of interest (NROI). ROI is the region that contains important information from a diagnosis point of view so it must be stored without any distortion. This paper develops an optimized embedding of payload in medical images by using genetic optimization. The goal is to preserve the region of interest from being distorted because of the watermark. By using this system there is no need to manually define the region of interest by experts as the system will apply the genetic optimization to select the parts of the image that can carry the watermark guaranteeing less distortion . The experimental results assure that genetic based optimization is useful for performing steganography with less mean square error percentage. This research develops an optimized embedding of payload in medical images by using watermarking and cryptography. The goal is to preserve the region of interest from being distorted because of the watermark.