Research Article
Robust and Fragile Medical Image Watermarking: A Joint
Venture of Coding and Chaos Theories
Atta Ur Rahman ,
1
Kiran Sultan,
2
Dhiaa Musleh,
1
Nahier Aldhafferi ,
3
Abdullah Alqahtani,
3
and Maqsood Mahmud
4
1
Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), P.O. Box. 1982, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
2
Department of CIT, JCC, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
3
Department of Computer Information System, College of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), P.O. Box. 1982, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
4
Department of MIS, College of Business Administration, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU),
P.O. Box 1982, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
Correspondence should be addressed to Atta Ur Rahman; dr.ataurahman@gmail.com
Received 24 October 2017; Revised 23 March 2018; Accepted 16 April 2018; Published 2 July 2018
Academic Editor: Maurizio Schmid
Copyright © 2018 Atta Ur Rahman et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
A secure spatial domain, hybrid watermarking technique for obtaining watermark (authentication information) robustness and
fragility of the host medical image (content integrity) using product codes, chaos theory, and residue number system (RNS) is
proposed. e proposed scheme is highly fragile and unrecoverable in terms of the host image, but it is significantly robust and
recoverable in terms of the watermark. Altering the medical image may result in misdiagnosis, hence the watermark that may
contain patient information and organization logo must be protected against certain attacks. e host medical image is separated
into two parts, namely, the region of interest (ROI) and region of noninterest (RONI) using a rectangular region. e RONI part is
used to embed the watermark information. Moreover, two watermarks are used: one to achieve authenticity of image and the other
to achieve the robustness against both incidental and malicious attacks. Effectiveness in terms of security, robustness, and fragility
of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by the simulations and comparison with the other state-of-the-art techniques.
1. Introduction
Digital watermarking is one of the most promising techniques
for authentication, copyright protection, and ownership
identification. In digital watermarking, the watermark in-
formation could be fragile, semifragile, robust, or hybrid.
Fragile watermarks are very sensitive and are used for tamper
detection, while the robust watermarks are used to withstand
common image processing operations. e watermark having
robustness against friendly attacks while fragile against mali-
cious attacks is called semifragile, and the one having mixed
properties is called a hybrid watermark [1]. Medical image
watermarking is becoming more promising in terms of se-
curity, privacy, and authenticity; hence, several schemes have
been investigated in this regard. Major purposes of the medical
image watermarking are authenticity and integrity control.
Here, the authenticity is referred to as the measure through
which it is ensured that the image source is valid and the image
belongs to the right patient. e integrity control is a capability
to validate that image has not been tampered by any means.
Since, in some cases, little modifications in the medical image
may cause a wrong diagnosis [2, 3], the authors in [4] focused
on integrity control and authentication of patient electronic
record (PER). While in [5], the authors focused on three areas
in medical image watermarking that are authentication, data
hiding, and their combination. In this paper, a DICOM image
was selected for experiments, after being divided into ROI and
RONI parts. e major drawback of the technique was fragility
of the watermark. Because the PER is an important
information, it must not be preserved through the fragile
Hindawi
Journal of Healthcare Engineering
Volume 2018, Article ID 8137436, 11 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/8137436