Debalina Biswas¹, Poulami Das¹, Prosenjit Maji¹, Nilanjan Dey¹ and Sheli Sinha Chaudhuri², ¹JIS College of Engineering, India and ²Jadavpur University, India

Transfer of medical information amongst various hospitals and diagnostic centers for mutual availability of diagnostic and therapeutic case studies is a very common process. Watermarking is adding “ownership” information in multimedia contents to verify signal integrity, prove authenticity and achieve control over the copy process. Distortion in Region of Interest (ROI) of a bio-medical image caused by watermarking may lead to wrong diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, proper selection of Region of Non-Interest (RONI) in a medical image is very crucial for adding watermark. First part of the present work proposes proper selection of Region of Non-Interest based on Fuzzy C-Means segmentation and Harris corner detection, to improve retention of diagnostic value lost in embedding ownership information. The second part of the work presents watermark embedding in the selected area of RONI based on alpha blending technique. In this approach, the generated watermarked image having an acceptable level of imperceptibility and distortion is compared to the original image. The Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the original image vs. watermarked image is calculated to prove the efficacy of the proposed method.

Fuzzy C-Means, Harris Corner Detection, ROI, RONI