Data hiding technologies for digital radiographies

Research on data hiding is demonstrating every day that several applications can benefit from this technology: among these, medical data management. In particular, embedding the patient’s information into a medical image through data hiding could improve the level of security and confidentiality that is essential for the diffusion of medical information sys- tems. The design of a data hiding system for such an application has to take into account specific requirements, the most important are: high payload to reliably identifying a pa- tient; quality preservation of the watermarked image; robustness to content modification. According to this analysis, a comparison between different data hiding approaches is pre- sented, to evaluate the most suitable algorithms for embedding patient’s information into digital radiographies. In particular two algorithms based on statistical decision theory have been compared with schemes following the new approach of modelling data hiding as com- munication with side-information at the transmitter. These methods have been tested and compared in the framework of digital radiographies management in order to identify their benefits and drawbacks.