Electrocardiogram-based dual watermarking scheme for healthcare applications

The strong need for a copy-protection scheme for healthcare data has been well recognized. Research studies show that invisibility, embedding capacity, and robustness are some of the most common watermarking features, which makes it difficult to balance the contradictions between them. Inspired by dual watermarking where multimarks are concealed inside the carrier media to offer a robust and secure model. In this chapter, we propose a watermarking scheme which embeds dual marks into a host electrocardiogram (ECG) signal using a transform-domain approach. First, we consider the redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) to decompose the 2D signal into non-overlapping sub-bands, and then the selected sub-bands are decomposed by fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) followed by QR decomposition to compute the coefficient for data embedding purposes. Second, we apply the sequence of RDWT-FHWT-QR to decompose both marks in a similar manner. Third, we modify the QR coefficients of the host signal with the coefficients of both marks. The QR code of the more robust mark (patient report) is generated to ensure its security against attack. Extensive analysis shows good performance of the proposed algorithm. Our experiments on ECG signals demonstrate that the robustness of our algorithm is significantly improved up to 63.94% when compared with traditional schemes.