A high capacity reversible data hiding scheme for radiographic images

Digital watermarking has been growing in popularity in latest years and plays a key role in the protection of intellectual property rights of multimedia content. In particular, reversible fragile watermarking is a feasible technique when security aspects like authentication, data integrity, and recovery of original data are required. This paper proposes a data hiding scheme to guarantee all the mentioned requests for radiographic images which are transmitted through a generic transmission channel. In particular, it is possible to ensure authenticity and to verify the integrity of the transmitted digital image. Moreover, both random errors and malicious attacks, that are likely to occur in an unprotected communication environment such as e-mail and Web, are jointly identied. The proposed scheme covers the combined use of digital signature techniques and fragile and reversible watermarking in the spatial domain to embed the patient data and the digital signature in the host image, ensuring high-capacity and high visual quality.