Hybrid Watermarking and Encryption Techniques for Securing Medical Images

Securing medical data while transmission on the network is required because it is sensitive and life-dependent data. Many methods are used for protection, such as Steganography, Digital Signature, Cryptography, and Watermarking. This paper introduces a novel robust algorithm that combines discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) digital image-watermarking algorithms. The host image is decomposed using a two-dimensional DWT (2D-DWT) to approximate low-frequency sub-bands in the embedding process. Then the sub-band low-high (LH) is decomposed using 2D-DWT to four new sub-bands. The resulting sub-band low-high (LH1) is decomposed using 2D-DWT to four new sub-bands. Two frequency bands, high-high (HH2) and high-low (HL2), are transformed by DCT, and then the SVD is applied to the DCT coefficients. The strongest modified singular values (SVs) vary very little for most attacks, which is an important property of SVD watermarking. The two watermark images are encrypted using two layers of encryption, circular and chaotic encryption techniques, to increase security. The first encrypted watermark is embedded in the S component of the DCT components of the HL2 coefficients. The second encrypted watermark is embedded in the S component of the DCT components of the HH2 coefficients. The suggested technique has been tested against various attacks and proven to provide excellent stability and imperceptibility results. © 2023 Authors. All rights reserved.