Chaotic based secure watermarking approach for medical images

Abstract

In this paper, a chaotic based secure medical image watermarking approach is proposed. The method is using non sub-sampled contourlet transform (NSCT), redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) to provide significant improvement in imperceptibility and robustness. Further, security of the approach is ensured by applying 2-D logistic map based chaotic encryption on watermarked medical image. In our approach, the cover image is initially divided into sub-images and NSCT is applied on the subimage having maximum entropy. Subsequently, RDWT is applied to NSCT image and the singular vector of the RDWT coefficient is calculated. Similar procedure is followed for both watermark images. The singular value of both watermarks is embedded into the singular matrix of the cover. Experimental evaluation shows when the approach is subjected to attacks, using combination of NSCT, RDWT, SVD and chaotic encryption it makes the approach robust, imperceptible, secure and suitable for medical applications.