Digital watermarking for ROI medical images by using compressed signature image

In medical images, ROI (Region Of Interest) is an area which contains important information and must be stored without any distortion. We propose a digital watermarking method which avoids the distortion of the image data in ROI by embedding signature information into other area than the ROI. Signature image compressed by a progressive coding algorithm is used as the signature information. The most significant information of the signature information is embedded in the nearest area to the ROI. The proposed method can detect the signature image with moderate quality from a clipped image including the ROI. Furthermore, by dividing the contour of the ROI into several regions and embedding the signature information in the regions respectively, the signature image with moderate quality can be acquired from a clipped image including only part of the ROI.