Multipurpose and intelligent watermarking scheme for medical data

In this paper, a new multipurpose watermarking scheme is proposed to provide protection and authentication of medical data. To achieve both purposes, integer discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) decomposition is first performed, and then robust watermark (e.g. logo data) is embedded in the low frequency IDWT sub-band for copyright protection, while fragile watermark (e.g. the diagnosis information) is inserted in the high frequency IDWT sub-band for tampering detection. A tradeoff between conflicting watermark requirements such as robustness, capacity and imperceptibility is achieved by particle swarm optimization (PSO) training technique. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The achieved fragileness and robustness confirmed that the proposed scheme has capability of rightful ownership protection and authentication simultaneously.