Medical Image Watermarking Based on Visual Secret Sharing and Cellular Automata Transform for Copyright Protection

In order to achieve the goal of protecting medical images, some existing watermark techniques for medical image protection mainly focus on improving the invisibility and robustness properties of the method, in order to prevent unnecessary medical disputes. This paper proposes a novel copyright method for medical image protection based on visual secret sharing (VSS) and cellular automata transform (CAT). This method uses the protected medical image feature as well as VSS and a watermark to produce the ownership share image (OSI). The OSI is used for medical image verification and must be registered to a certified authority. In the watermark extraction process, the suspected medical image is used to generate a master share image (MSI). The watermark can be extracted by combining the MSI and the OSI. Different from other traditional methods, the proposed method does not need to modify the medical image in order to protect the copyright of the image. Moreover, the registered OSI used to verify the ownership and its appearance display meaningful information, facilitating image management. Finally, the results of the final experiment can prove the effectiveness of our method.