Prospects of Digital Watermarking in Providing Security, Reliability, and Privacy to Medical Images

Telemedicine is one of the most eminent terms used in the modern e-healthcare system. Digital medical image reports, along with electronic patient records, play a central role in diagnosis from distance. These reports need to be transmitted over an open communication channel with immense security and reliability, so that appropriate diagnosis can be performed. Moreover, the privacy of the patient is required to be preserved. Digital watermarking is one of the most conventional and suitable practices to serve all of these purposes. New challenges appear in the domain of watermarking with the advancement of digital signal processing; consequently, researchers are endowing more efforts to overcome these challenges. In this paper, a survey on medical image watermarking has been done, and the performance of a few state-of-the-art medical image watermarking techniques is compared. This work makes the researchers and the developers familiar with the recent trends, challenges, and scopes in this domain to facilitate them in finding out adequate research directions.