HIDEmarks: hiding multiple marks for robust medical data sharing using IWT-LSB

With the increasing popularity of digital data in the healthcare domain, data hiding has become a hot research topic for covert communication and privacy protection. Existing data-hiding methods often tend to results in increased imperceptibility and robustness, which are also needed to simultaneously improve the system’s security and embedding capacity. To solve this problem, a robust and high-capacity data hiding technique, called HIDEmarks, our study proposed a combination of integer wavelet transform (IWT) and least significant bit (LSB) for healthcare. Specifically, the IWT-LSB was used to embed multiple marks into the medical colour image. The technique first transformed cover images into three channels, and then each channel was transformed using IWT. After this, multiple marks were concealed into the cover media with the help of the LSB scheme. Meanwhile, a lossless soft method was adopted to compress the image mark prior to embedding, thereby reducing storage and transmission overhead and improving the embedding capacity of the marked colour image. Experimental results show that the proposed HIDEmarks achieved superior perceptual quality, robustness and capacity compared with the state-of-the-art schemes.