A robust and secured fusion based hybrid medical image watermarking approach using RDWT-DWT-MSVD with Hyperchaotic system-Fibonacci Q Matrix encryption.

Digital image watermarking, the process of marking a host image with a watermark, is generally used to authenticate the data. In the medical field, it is of utmost importance to verify the authenticity of the data using Medical Image Watermarking (MIW), especially in e-healthcare applications. Recently, MIW with image fusion, the merging of multimodal images to improve image quality, is being widely utilized to make diagnosis more accessible and precise with the verified data. This paper offers a durable and secure fusion-based hybrid MIW approach. The method initially used Fast Filtering (FF) to merge two medical images from different modalities to form the cover image. A first-level Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) is employed on this host image to locate the component with the highest entropy. Then a single-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is applied to it. It performed a Multi-resolution Singular Value Decomposition (MSVD) on the wavelet decomposed component and the embedding watermark. Finally, a Hyperchaotic System-Fibonacci Q Matrix (HFQM) encryption system was utilized, which increases the watermarked image's security. Here, using various medical images, the performance of the proposed technique is evaluated. Without any attacks, the approach achieved a maximum Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 90.31 dB and a Structural Similarity Index Matrix (SSIM) of value 1. Various watermarking assaults were employed to test the proposed method's resilience. The suggested technique achieved a perfect value of 1 for the Normalised Correlation (NC) for almost all attacks with acceptable imperceptibility, which substantially improves over current procedures. The suggested technique's average embedding and extraction times are 0.3958 and 0.4721 seconds, respectively, which are pretty short compared to existing approaches.