An improved separable reversible patient data hiding algorithm for E-healthcare

In the telemedicine industry, a standout among the most significant issue is the exchange of Electronic Patient Information (EPI) between patient and a doctor that are remotely connected. A minute change to EPI may result in a wrong diagnosis for the patient. To ensure secure and safe communication for telemedicine applications, a dual-image separable block-based reversible data hiding algorithm in encrypted domain for embedding secret message in base(5) numeral framework is proposed here. The proposed scheme has not been suffering from underflow and overflow problem so that empowering it to embed and recover information precisely from low-intensity pixels too. This property makes our proposed methodology truly reasonable for its utilization on medical images. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach, experiments have been performed on different test images. The average PSNR value is 54.10 dB for an embedding capacity of 327,680 bits for all test images which demonstrates that the method is capable of giving good quality stego images even at high payload also. The experimental study revealed that for all types of test images, the proposed methodology altogether beaten all the compared methodologies in its ability to embed secret message and precisely recover it by maintaining the visual quality of stego images too.