Reversible Data Hiding Based on Medical Image Systems by Means of Histogram Strategy

The privacy issue in health care application is more important. This paper presents an application in medical image for protecting patient information (called as a medical record). The reversible image-hiding scheme based on histogram shifting is mainly used for protecting medical record. In addition, we applied two parameters, linear predictor with non-uniform weight and threshold, to improve the performance in terms of medical image quality and embedding record ratio. The weight is adapted to improve the prediction accuracy, thus increasing confidential information embedded capacity. A threshold is used to determine image characteristics and avoid overflow or underflow problems. For image characteristic decisions, we choose a peak point and then, shifted right one unit for data concealing. Before the data hiding, our method will be also pre-process the underflow and overflow problems for the image in which the embedded medical record overflow occurred in the image and for the image generation has no salt and pepper effect. Experimental results show that our method is capable of providing a great embedding capacity without making noticeable distortion. In our method, using weight and threshold values can indeed increase the embedding capacity from histogram-based data hiding while retaining the image quality.