Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 757018, 17 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/757018
Research Article

A Novel Fractional-Discrete-Cosine-Transform-Based Reversible Watermarking for Healthcare Information Management Systems

Lu-Ting Ko,1 Jwu-E Chen,1 Yaw-Shih Shieh,2 Massimo Scalia,3 and Tze-Yun Sung2

1Department of Electrical Engineering, National Central University, Chungli 320-01, Taiwan
2Department of Electronics Engineering, Chung Hua University, Hsinchu 300-12, Taiwan
3Department of Mathematics “Guido Castelnuovo”, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, 00185 Rome, Italy

Received 7 November 2011; Accepted 30 November 2011

Academic Editor: Ming Li

Copyright © 2012 Lu-Ting Ko et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Digital watermarking is a good tool for healthcare information management systems. The well-known quantization-index-modulation- (QIM-) based watermarking has its limitations as the host image will be destroyed; however, the recovery of medical image is essential to avoid misdiagnosis. A transparent yet reversible watermarking algorithm is required for medical image applications. In this paper, we propose a fractional-discrete-cosine-transform- (FDCT-) based watermarking to exactly reconstruct the host image. Experimental results show that the FDCT-based watermarking is preferable to the QIM-based watermarking for the medical image applications.