Semi-Blind Watermarking and Blockchain-Based Approach for Copyright Protection of Medical Images

The security of Digital Healthcare Records (DHR) data remains significantly under-researched, despite the extensive research conducted on watermarking for healthcare applications. This article introduces strong and secure watermarking algorithms designed to ensure the transmission and storage of DHR in blockchain-based healthcare applications. The suggested method uses Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) along with Multi-Resolution Singular Value Decomposition (MRSVD) to add watermark data to the medical host image with as little distortion as possible. NSST has the advantage of being resistant to shift and is effective at gathering more directional data. To protect the image from unwanted access, the watermarked image is encrypted using Hybrid Chaotic Shift Transform and modified Henon Maps, rendering it resilient against various signal processing attacks. Additionally, Blockchain technology is implemented for the transfer of marked images, eliminating the necessity for any untrustworthy third party. The experimental findings of the watermarking technology demonstrate substantial resilience to various attacks while preserving the high quality of the marked image with the average PSNR and NC values of 55.03124 dB and 0.999203, respectively. This strategy demonstrates superior robustness compared to existing methods, with an optimal enhancement of 47.74%.