Title: Hybrid technique for robust and imperceptible dual watermarking using error correcting codes for application in telemedicine

Authors: Amit Kumar Singh; Mayank Dave; Anand Mohan

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, Haryana, 136119, India ' Department of Computer Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, Haryana, 136119, India ' Department of Electronics Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 221005, India

Abstract: In this paper, the effects of different error correction codes on the robustness and the image quality are investigated. Three different error correcting codes such as Hamming, the Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem (BCH) and the Reed-Solomon code are considered to encode the watermark. The embedding watermarks method based on the two most popular transform techniques which are discrete wavelet transforms (DWTs) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed algorithm is robust against a number of signal processing attacks without significant degradation of the image quality. The experimental results demonstrate that this algorithm combines the advantages and remove the disadvantages of these two transform. Out of three error correcting codes tested, it has been found that Reed-Solomon shows the best performance. A detailed analysis of the results of implementation is given.

Keywords: image watermarking; steganography; discrete wavelet transforms; DWTs; singular value decomposition; SVD; error correcting codes; dual watermarking; telemedicine; image quality; signal processing attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2014.065739

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2014 Vol.6 No.4, pp.285 - 305

Received: 25 Mar 2014
Accepted: 23 Jul 2014
Published online: 26 Nov 2014 *

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