Nested quantization index modulation for reversible watermarking and its application to healthcare information management systems (Q764224)

Summary: Digital watermarking has attracted lots of researches to healthcare information management systems for access control, patients' data protection, and information retrieval. The well-known quantization index modulation-(QIM-) based watermarking has its limitations as the host image will be destroyed; however, the recovery of medical images is essential to avoid misdiagnosis. In this paper, we propose the nested QIM-based watermarking, which is preferable to the QIM-based watermarking for the medical image applications. As the host image can be exactly reconstructed by the nested QIM-based watermarking. The capacity of the embedded watermark can be increased by taking advantage of the proposed nest structure. The algorithm and mathematical model of the nested QIM-based watermarking including forward and inverse model is presented. Due to algorithms and architectures of forward and inverse nested QIM, the concurrent programs and special processors for the nested QIM-based watermarking are easily implemented.