Whirlpool Algorithm with Hash Function Based Watermarking Algorithm for the Secured Transmission of Digital Medical Images

Watermarking methods are widely used to provide high-end security in Digital Medical Images (DMI). In general, a secret key is used with the watermarking methods to combine with the original data. In this paper, a novel Whirlpool algorithm with hash function based water marking method is proposed for providing the integrity for DMI. The proposed framework consists of two blocks such as watermark embedding and extracting process and Regular-Singular (R–S) Vector compression. During the embedding process, the watermark is used to enable the image integrity and authentication. To create the watermark, whirlpool hash function is used to create the hash value. This hash value is mixed with patient ID and R-S vector to create the watermark image. Group Extraction is the process of splitting up the image into groups and denoted as a singular value. In R-S vector representation 1 denotes the regular group R, while 0 represents the singular group. The unused groups U are represented as −1. The unused groups U are represented as −1. The performance of the proposed watermarking algorithm is evaluated with the help of Mean Square Error (MSE), PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), Bit Error Rate (BER), Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) and Bit Correction Rate (BCR). The experimental results proved the good performance of the proposed watermarking algorithm with the comparison of existing watermarking methods.