Open Access

ARTICLE

A Triple-Channel Encrypted Hybrid Fusion Technique to Improve Security of Medical Images

Ahmed S. Salama^1,2,3, Mohamed Amr Mokhtar³, Mazhar B. Tayel³, Esraa Eldesouky^4,6, Ahmed Ali^5,6,*

1 Future University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt
2 Cairo Higher Institute for Engineering, Computer Science and Management, Cairo, Egypt
3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Alexandria, 21544, Egypt
4 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Suez Canal University, Ismailia City, Egypt
5 Higher Future Institute for Specialized Technological Studies, Cairo, Egypt
6 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Engineering and Sciences, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj, 11942, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Ahmed Ali. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 68(1), 431-446. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.016165

Received 25 December 2020; Accepted 26 January 2021; Issue published 22 March 2021

Abstract

Assuring medical images protection and robustness is a compulsory necessity nowadays. In this paper, a novel technique is proposed that fuses the wavelet-induced multi-resolution decomposition of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with the energy compaction of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DCT). The multi-level Encryption-based Hybrid Fusion Technique (EbhFT) aims to achieve great advances in terms of imperceptibility and security of medical images. A DWT disintegrated sub-band of a cover image is reformed simultaneously using the DCT transform. Afterwards, a 64-bit hex key is employed to encrypt the host image as well as participate in the second key creation process to encode the watermark. Lastly, a PN-sequence key is formed along with a supplementary key in the third layer of the EbHFT. Thus, the watermarked image is generated by enclosing both keys into DWT and DCT coefficients. The fusions ability of the proposed EbHFT technique makes the best use of the distinct privileges of using both DWT and DCT methods. In order to validate the proposed technique, a standard dataset of medical images is used. Simulation results show higher performance of the visual quality (i.e., 57.65) for the watermarked forms of all types of medical images. In addition, EbHFT robustness outperforms an existing scheme tested for the same dataset in terms of Normalized Correlation (NC). Finally, extra protection for digital images from against illegal replicating and unapproved tampering using the proposed technique.

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Citations