Secured Telemedicine Using Whole Image as Watermark with Tamper Localization and Recovery Capabilities

Region of interest (ROI) is the most informative part of a medical image and mostly has been used as a major part of watermark. Various shapes ROIs selection have been reported in region-based watermarking techniques. In region-based watermarking schemes an image region of non-interest (RONI) is the second important part of the image and is used mostly for watermark encapsulation. In online healthcare systems the ROI wrong selection by missing some important portions of the image to be part of ROI can create problem at the destination. This paper discusses the complete medical image availability in original at destination using the whole image as a watermark for authentication, tamper localization and lossless recovery (WITALLOR). The WITALLOR watermarking scheme ensures the complete image security without of ROI selection at the source point as compared to the other region-based watermarking techniques. The complete image is compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless compression technique to get the watermark in reduced number of bits. Bits reduction occurs to a number that can be completely encapsulated into image. The watermark is randomly encapsulated at the least significant bits (LSBs) of the image without caring of the ROI and RONI to keep the image perceptual degradation negligible. After communication, the watermark is retrieved, decompressed and used for authentication of the whole image, tamper detection, localization and lossless recovery. WITALLOR scheme is capable of any number of tampers detection and recovery at any part of the image. The complete authentic image gives the opportunity to conduct an image based analysis of medical problem without restriction to a fixed ROI.