Effective Self-Recovery and Tampering Localization Fragile Watermarking for Medical Images

It is increasingly important to achieve security and anti-counterfeiting for medical images. The integrity and verifiability of medical images before they are reviewed for potential medical diagnoses is imperative. This paper presents an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for medical images. Both self-recovery information and authentication code for each block are generated in advance and then embedded into other blocks separately with the help of the turtle shell and embedding table. In the tampering detection and localization phase, a three-level detection and localization strategy is employed to achieve higher accuracy for tampering localization. In the self-recovery phase, a two-hierarchical restoration method is exploited to achieve higher image quality in the recovered images. Several malicious attacks were tested to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of tampering detection and image recovery. Simulation results confirmed that the tampering detection rate can be up to 99.83% and the average PSNR of a recovered image can be up to 42.11 dB, both of which are higher than those of the Shehab et al.'s method