Hybrid technique for robust and imperceptible dual watermarking using error correcting codes for application in telemedicine

Abstract

In this paper, the effects of different error correction codes on the robustness and the image quality are investigated. Three different error correcting codes such as Hamming, the Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem (BCH) and the Reed-Solomon code are considered to encode the watermark. The embedding watermarks method based on the two most popular transform techniques which are discrete wavelet transforms (DWTs) and singular value decomposition (SVD). The proposed algorithm is robust against a number of signal processing attacks without significant degradation of the image quality. The experimental results demonstrate that this algorithm combines the advantages and remove the disadvantages of these two transform. Out of three error correcting codes tested, it has been found that Reed-Solomon shows the best performance. A detailed analysis of the results of implementation is given. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.