Joint Steganography-Source-Channel Coding for Wireless Physiological Signal Transmission

In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Steganography-Source-Channel Coding (JS(2)C(2)) scheme for scalable physiological signal transmission in wireless networks. Our goal is to secure patient's confidential data in medical signal by using Unequally Steganography Embedding and progressively transmit it by Joint Source-Channel Coding, limiting the extent of end to end distortion in the received signal, while abating transmission energy. The main contribution of this paper lies in the inherently joint design of the physiological signal steganography coding and transmission by taking advantage of the unequal importance among different segments of the physiological data. Higher steganography coding level and more robust source-channel coding will protect those highly important segments of the physiological data. Therefore, data integrity and transmission efficiency can be achieved in a resilient way. Simulation results demonstrate that USE attains low distortion (Wavelet-based Weighted Percent Root-mean-squared Difference, i.e. WWPRD <0.45%) as well as high correlation between cover and stego data. Furthermore, low end-to-end Mean-Square-Error (MSE) indicates strong imperceptibility of stego data and ascertains that physiological signal remains diagnosable after JS(2)C(2).