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A high-capacity reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement and brightness preservation for medical images

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Abstract

The healthcare industry has witnessed an increase in the use of cloud storage, resulting in a significant demand for safeguarding medical records from potential attackers. In response to this challenge, reversible data hiding (RDH) has emerged as a lifesaver. The RDH ensures the concealment of private and confidential data with minimal loss to the cover image while offering opportunities for image enhancement. This paper introduces a new RDH method with contrast enhancement for medical images. The method aims to provide high embedding capacity (EC) while preserving brightness. To achieve this, the proposed method initially segments cover images into regions of interest (ROI) and non-regions of interest (NROI) and employs different embedding strategies based on the characteristics of each region, thereby enhancing embedding performance. Furthermore, a novel pre-processing technique is introduced for processing ROI pixels. This technique re-organizes and creates empty bins to provide enlarged EC with less distortion by capitalizing on the unique properties of medical images. Additionally, the proposed method embeds secret data in the NROI to further increase the EC. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively preserves brightness (with 0.99 Relative Mean Brightness Error) while providing higher EC, exceeding the best-known methods by 20%. Furthermore, the method enhances contrast with minimal distortion in the output images.

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Data Availability

The data and code will be made available on placing a request to the first author.

Abbreviations

ACERDH:

Automatic contrast enhancement method with reversible data hiding

ATD:

Adaptive thresholding

bpp:

bits per pixel

EC:

Embedding capacity

ER:

Embedding rate

NROI:

Non-region of interest

LSB:

Least significant bit

OPHBE:

Order preserving histogram bin expansion

PCR:

Pixel concentration ratio

PSNR:

Peak signal to noise ratio

RCE:

Relative contrast error

RDH:

Reversible data hiding

RDHACEM:

Reversible data hiding With automatic contrast enhancement for medical images

RDHCE:

Reversible data hiding contrast enhancement

RMBE:

Relative mean brightness error

ROI:

Region of interest

SSIM:

Structural similarity index metric

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Delhi, 110042, India

    Sonal Gandhi & Rajeev Kumar

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  1. Sonal Gandhi
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  2. Rajeev Kumar
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Correspondence to Rajeev Kumar.

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Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Histograms showing embedding process

Fig. 14
figure 14

Example histograms generated during embedding by the proposed method

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1.2 Stego-images of Brain01 by various methods

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figure 15

Stego-images from PH1, RDHACEM, RHCRDH, OPBHE and the Proposed method at ER of 0.1 bpp (a-e), 0.5 bpp (f-j), 1 bpp (k-o)

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Gandhi, S., Kumar, R. A high-capacity reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement and brightness preservation for medical images. Multimed Tools Appl (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-18934-1

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