1 3 Reversible watermarking scheme for medical image based on differential 4 evolution 5 6 7 Baiying Lei a Q1 , Ee-Leng Tan b , Siping Chen a , Dong Ni a,⇑ , Tianfu Wang a,⇑ , Haijun Lei c 8 a Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Shenzhen University, National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong 9 Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, Nanhai Ave 3688, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518060, PR China Q2 10 b School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Q3 11 c College of Computer Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, PR China 12 13 15 article info 16 17 Keywords: 18 Reversible watermarking 19 Differential evolution 20 Medical image 21 Recursive dither modulation 22 23 abstract 24 Currently, most medical images are stored and exchanged with little or no security; hence it is important 25 to provide protection for the intellectual property of these images in a secured environment. In this paper, 26 a new and reversible watermarking method is proposed to address this security issue. Specifically, signa- 27 ture information and textual data are inserted into the original medical images based on recursive dither 28 modulation (RDM) algorithm after wavelet transform and singular value decomposition (SVD). In addi- 29 tion, differential evolution (DE) is applied to design the quantization steps (QSs) optimally for controlling 30 the strength of the watermark. Using these specially designed hybrid techniques, the proposed water- 31 marking technique obtains good imperceptibility and high robustness. Experimental results indicate that 32 the proposed method is not only highly competitive, but also outperforms the existing methods. 33 Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 34 35 36 1. Introduction 37 With the rapid development of telediagnosis, telesurgery as 38 well as hospital information system, medical images have become 39 one of the most important tools in helping physicians to determine 40 suitable diagnostic procedures (Das & Kundu, 2012; Giakoumaki, 41 Pavlopoulos, & Koutsouris, 2006; Kong & Feng, 2001; Li & Kim, 42 2013). Medical images are also essential in evaluating patients’ 43 recovery from their treatment (Das & Kundu, 2012; Deng, Chen, 44 Zeng, Zhang, & Mao, 2013; Giakoumaki et al., 2006; Kong & Feng, 45 2001). However, the sharing, handling, and processing of medical 46 images can lead to security, confidentiality, copyright forgery, 47 and integrity issues. Therefore, it is essential to provide security 48 solutions for medical images to prevent any misuse or violation. 49 To address the security issues related to medical images, Podilchuk 50 and Delp proposed an effective and promising solution using a 51 watermarking technique (Podilchuk & Delp, 2001). Watermarks 52 such as patient-ID, tag, label, trademark, logo or signature is 53 embedded into the multimedia object by changing the pixel gray 54 level values of image without any perceptible changes on the host 55 image (Giakoumaki et al., 2006; Kong & Feng, 2001). In fact, revers- 56 ible watermarking technique or lossless method (Celik, Sharma, & 57 Tekalp, 2006) is especially useful for medical images as it is 58 possible to recover the original image without any distortion at 59 the receiver side. 60 To allow doctors to make an accurate diagnosis using medical 61 images, even very small distortion should be avoided in medical 62 applications. Reversible watermarking methods not only meet 63 the watermarking requirements of robustness, imperceptibility 64 and capacity, they also can retrieve the host signal without distor- 65 tion. Therefore, these methods have been widely applied in the lit- 66 erature (Alattar, 2004; An et al., 2012; Arsalan, Malik, & Khan, 67 2012; Coatrieux, Le Guillou, Cauvin, & Roux, 2009; Coatrieux, 68 Lecornu, Sankur, & Roux, 2006; Coatrieux, Pan, Cuppens-Boulahia, 69 Cuppens, & Roux, 2013; Deng et al., 2013; Farfoura et al., 2012; 70 Kamran, Khan., & Malik, 2014; Ni, Shi, Ansari, & Su, 2006; Shi & 71 Xiao, 2013; Shih & Wu, 2005; Tian, 2003; Zhang, Bao, Wang, & 72 Xu, 2013) for both copyright protection and tampering authentica- 73 tion in the recent decade. Due to the algebraic or geometric prop- 74 erties of reversible watermarking, it is especially suitable for 75 medical images (Arsalan et al., 2012; Coatrieux et al., 2009; Coat- 76 rieux et al., 2013; Farfoura et al., 2012; Shih & Wu, 2005). Differ- 77 ence expansion (Alattar, 2004), sorting and prediction (Sachnev, 78 Kim, Nam, Suresh, & Shi, 2009), histogram modification (An et al., 79 2012; Coatrieux et al., 2013), lossless compression (Celik, Sharma, 80 Tekalp, & Saber, 2005; De Vleeschouwer, Delaigle, & Macq, 2003), 81 prediction-error histogram (Zhang et al., 2013) and hybrid meth- 82 ods (Kamran et al., 2014) are the most popular algorithms to real- 83 ize the reversibility of watermarking algorithm. Although there are 84 some existing work (Arsalan et al., 2012; Coatrieux et al., 2009) on 0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.11.019 ⇑ Corresponding authors. Tel.: +86 755 26534314; fax: +86 755 26534940. E-mail addresses: nidong@szu.edu.cn (D. Ni), tfwang@szu.edu.cn (T. Wang). Expert Systems with Applications xxx (2013) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Expert Systems with Applications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa ESWA 9037 No. of Pages 11, Model 5G 3 December 2013 Please cite this article in press as: Lei, B., et al. Reversible watermarking scheme for medical image based on differential evolution. Expert Systems with Applications (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2013.11.019