Title: Generating optimal informed and adaptive watermark image based on zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams for medical images

Authors: Lamri Laouamer; Muath Alshaikh; Laurent Nana; Anca Chrisitine Pascu

Addresses: Department of Management Information Systems, CBE, Qassim University, P.O. Box 6633, Buraydah, 51452, KSA; Lab-STICC (UMR CNRS 6285), University of Western Brittany, Brest, 20 avenue Victor Le Gorgeu, BP 817 – CS 93837, 29238 Brest Cedex, France ' Department of Management Information Systems, CBE, Qassim University, P.O. Box 6633, Buraydah, 51452, KSA ' Lab-STICC (UMR CNRS 6285), University of Western Brittany, Brest, 20 avenue Victor Le Gorgeu, BP 817 – CS 93837, 29238 Brest Cedex, France ' Lab-STICC (UMR CNRS 6285), University of Western Brittany, Brest, 20 avenue Victor Le Gorgeu, BP 817 – CS 93837, 29238 Brest Cedex, France; Faculty of Lettres, University of Western Brittany, Brest CS 93837, 29238 Brest Cedex, France

Abstract: Watermarking protects legitimate copies of digital multimedia, such as video, audio and images, from unauthorized use. Digital watermarks are used to verify the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of data to prove the identity of its owners. Watermark generation is one of the most important aspects of watermarking schemes, and should aim to produce as small a watermark as possible (a low quantity of data to be embedded in the multimedia) to reduce the complexity of computational processes. Although embedding a large amount of watermark data in almost any medium increases the chances of recovering it, this also increases the complexity, which can become impractical for real time applications. In this paper, we focus on the robustness of medical image watermarks and present a means to generate a small watermark. This idea is very innovative in the watermarking field. The proposed approach is based on Zero-Suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams (ZBDD). ZBDD has proven its effectiveness in many fields, such as data mining, big data processing, computer networks, etc. Application of ZBDD to medical image watermarking will help us to take into account not only the complexity and the capacity factors but also the watermark robustness. The results obtained are very significant and encouraging and will be examined in this paper under several attack scenarios.

Keywords: zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams; ZBDDs; combination sets; medical images; image watermarking; attacks; complexity; adaptive watermarks; watermark robustness; watermark images; digital multimedia; digital watermarks; digital images; healthcare technology; medical imaging.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2016.077451

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2016 Vol.8 No.3, pp.262 - 284

Received: 14 Jul 2015
Accepted: 02 Feb 2016
Published online: 30 Jun 2016 *

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