Protecting patient privacy from unauthorized release of medical images using a bio-inspired wavelet-based watermarking approach

This paper identifies a novel digital watermarking approach for copyright protection and authentication of medical images based on the wavelet transformation. We consider the problem of protecting patients' medical records and tracing illegally distributed medical images in a group communication environment. We employ the particle swarm algorithm and genetic algorithm optimization principles to obtain performance improvement in our work. In the proposed method, the strength of the embedded watermark and noise are controlled to prevent the images from being used directly regarding to visual properties of the host signal. These parameters and also the places of the embedded watermarks are varied to find the most suitable ones for images with different characteristics. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields a watermark which is invisible to human eyes, robust against a wide variety of common attacks and reliable enough for tracing colluders. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.