Efficient reconfigurable architecture to enhance medical image security

Abstract

Medical images are one of the most critical and sensitive types of data in information systems. For the secure storage and transfer of medical images, confidentiality is the most important aspect. This paper presents efficient embedding technique to enhance medical image security. The Gaussian filters are used as preprocessing to remove high frequency components and then applied to cumulative distribution function (CDF) 5/3 wavelet to obtain LL band features. Similarly, the LL band features of cover image are obtained. The alpha bending technique combines both the LL band features of cover and secret image to form first level of encryption and now with other high frequency bands of LH, HL and HH applied to Inverse CDF 5/3 obtains an encrypted image which is then transferred along with key obtained through other bands of LH, HL and HH. The key generated acts as additional level of security and similarly, at the receiver the opposite operations are performed to obtain the original secrete image. The performance is measured in terms of Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and is compared with existing techniques to validate the results. Further, the entire architecture is synthesized on spartan 6 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board to compare the hardware utilizations.