Multiple layer data hiding scheme for medical images

Nowadays, the transmission of digitized medical information has become very convenient due to the generality of Internet. Regardless of the prevention of medical fault, the real-time detection of abnormal event, the support of clinical decision, even the model developing of medical service based on patient, Internet has created the biggest benefit to achieve the goals of promoting patient safety and medicine quality. However, it is easier that the hackers can grab or duplicate the digitized information on the Internet. This will cause following problems of medical security and copyright protection. Therefore, the information hiding techniques are developed for protection of medical information and copyright. This paper proposes a multiple-layer data hiding technique in spatial domain. It utilizes a reduced difference expansion method to embed the bitstream in the least significant bits (LSBs) of the expanded differences. By using the reduced difference expansion method, we can embed a large amount of data in a medical image whose quality can also be maintained. Moreover, the original image can be restored after extracting the hidden data from the stego-image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides higher embedding capacity at the same level image quality compared with Tian's difference expansion method. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.