A Novel Security and Authentication Technique for Reliable Wireless Transmission of Healthcare Images in Smart Home and Mobile Health Systems Based on Digital Watermarking

Abstract

The development of wireless technology enabled smart home and mobile health systems are on the rise and the integration of these smart home technologies to support healthcare is acquiring an increasing global significance. Teleradiology systems and various other telemedicine devices are being integrated into smart home technologies and these devices produce healthcare images that need to be transmitted to a central server or third party via various wireless networks. In this paper, we present a unique approach to improve the security and authentication of healthcare images based on digital watermarking. In this technique, the healthcare images are separated into the Region of Interest (ROI) and the Region of Non-Interest (RONI) and we implemented DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) algorithm to successfully embed a watermark into the RONI section of the healthcare images. The technique is robust in proving authentication of healthcare images and can be considered as a lossless technique, since the ROI of the images were not affected and the healthcare images were accurately recovered into the original state during the extraction process. Moreover, we will present some new ideas that will be used in our future research work.