Enhanced reversible and secure patient data hiding algorithm based on cellular automata

To guarantee a secure communication in E-medical platform, an enhanced reversible data hiding algorithm based on cellular automata has been presented in this paper. Highlight of proposed method is to embed electronic patient information (EPI) in base(4) numeral framework at seed and in base(2) numeral framework at non-seed pixels of a 3 x 3 sized overlapped block and simultaneously encrypted though Paillier cryptosystem respectively. EPI is embedded at central non-seed pixel using two dimensional cellular automata (2D-CA (rule 171)) depending upon the parity (Odd or Even) of least significant bits of non-seed pixels of a 3 x 3 sized block. To prove the effectiveness of proposed method, experimental study has been carried out using MATLAB R2017a platform for different 256 x 256 sized test images obtained from open-source image database (USC-SIPI) whereas medical images obtained from the database of The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) respectively. Maximum average embedding rate (2.24 bpp) is achieved by proposed method and precisely recover EPI with a PSNR value of infinity dB between the cover image and reconstructed image respectively. The average embedding rate is 2.24 bpp for all test images which demonstrates that the proposed method is capable for embedding high payload in comparison of other methods respectively.

Automated summary

This paper presents an enhanced reversible data hiding algorithm based on cellular automata for secure communication in E-medical platform. The proposed method embeds electronic patient information in different numeral frameworks and encrypts them using Paillier cryptosystem. Experimental results demonstrate that the method achieves high embedding rate and accurate recovery of the embedded information.