Majdi Al-qdah¹ and Anas Alqudah², ¹University of Tabuk, KSA and ²University of Abu Dhabi, UAE

This paper presents the results of watermarking selected various medical cover images with simple string of letters image (patients' medical data) using a combination of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The visual quality of the watermarked images (before and after attacks) was analyzed using PSNR and four visual quality metrics (WSNR, MSSIM, PSNR-HVS-M, and PSNR-HVS). The PSNR, PSNR-HVS-M, PSNR-HVS, and WSNR average values of the watermarked medical images before attacks were about the 32 db, 35 db, and 42 db, 40 db respectively; while the MSSM index indicated a similarity of more than 97% between the original and watermarked images. The metric values decreased significantly after attacking the images with various operations but the watermark image could be retrieved after almost all attacks. Thus, the initial results indicate that watermarking medical images with the patients' data does not significantly affect their visual quality and they still can be utilized for their medical purpose.

Watermarking, medical images, DWT, DCT, SVD, visual metrics