A novel blind medical image watermarking scheme based on Schur triangulation and chaotic sequence

Image watermarking is a potentially effective and powerful solution for multimedia security. It is a technique that plays a fundamental role in protecting copyright, proofing ownership, and helps to authenticate sensitive data. Watermarking can cause a decrease in image quality, especially when it comes to medical images. This could provoke false diagnoses, which can lead to serious consequences on the patient's health. In fact, it becomes necessary to think for new more imperceptible, secure watermarking techniques. To provide such techniques, we proposed a novel blind watermarking scheme for medical images, based on Schur decomposition and chaotic sequence (CS). An efficient chaotic method is applied on the watermark and the cover image to obtain encrypted images divided into subblocks. A decomposition based on Schur is utilized to embed the encrypted watermark bits in the cyphered cover image blocks. The same CS is applied to extract the original watermark. We compared the proposed technique with other watermarking schemes. The experimentation results demonstrate that the suggested method achieving good image fidelity and acceptable robustness.