A fragile watennarking scheme for telemedicine

The infrastructure to deploy security standards is often lacking during modern telemedicine. As a branch of watermarking technique, the fragile watermarking provides us a good solution to the authentication for telemedicine. A fragile watermarking algorithm based on wavelet transform, hash function and hybrid chaotic sequence is presented in this paper. The watermark signal is firstly pre-processed by exclusive-OR (XOR) operation with the hylbrid chaotic sequence in order to increase the security of the watermarking algorithm. Then, it is embedded in the selected low frequency sub-band of the host image´s wavelet transform domain. Finally, the watermarked image is obtained using the reverse wavelet transform. The experimental results show 1 hat the watermark is invisible; the watermark algorithm is fragile to common image manipulations and has good ability to resist counterfeiting attacks. Furthermore, after the watermark is extracted from the watermarked image, it is exactly the same as the original one and could be used for real-time diagnosis.