Encryption and Watermarking for Medical Image Protection
Résumé
This chapter focuses on recent advances on medical data security based on the combination of watermarking and encryption which can be used in healthcare so as to offer a more complete and continuous protection of digital data. Indeed, if encryption can be considered as an ``a priori" protection mechanism since once data are decrypted they are no longer protected, it should be completed by an ``a posteriori" protection, a protection watermarking can provide. Basically, when it is applied to images, watermarking modifies or modulates in an imperceptible way the image pixels' gray level values in order to insert a message. This message can be used to assess the origins as well as the integrity of the image. As defined, watermarking provides an ``a posteriori" protection as the image content is still available for interpretation while remaining protected. In order to benefit from the complementarity of these two mechanisms in terms of a priori/a posteriori protection different approaches have been proposed. In this chapter, we present the different purposes their combination have been suggested for in the healthcare domain. We also depict one practical joint watermarking encryption algorithm well adapted to telemedicine application frameworks.