Data hiding technologies for digital radiography

Research on data hiding is demonstrating every day that several applications can benefit from this technology; among these, medical data management. In particular, embedding patient 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 systems. 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 identifying reliably a patient; quality preservation of the watermarked image; robustness to content modification. According to this analysis, a comparison between different data hiding approaches is presented, to evaluate the most suitable algorithms for embedding patient information into digital radiographs. In particular two algorithms based on statistical decision theory have been compared with schemes following the new approach of modelling data hiding as communication 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.