A SURF and SVD-based robust zero-watermarking for medical image integrity

Medical image security is paramount in the digital era but remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces an innovative zero-watermarking methodology tailored for medical imaging, ensuring robust protection without compromising image quality. We utilize Sped-up Robust features for high-precision feature extraction and singular value decomposition (SVD) to embed watermarks into the frequency domain, preserving the original image’s integrity. Our methodology uniquely encodes watermarks in a non-intrusive manner, leveraging the robustness of the extracted features and the resilience of the SVD approach. The embedded watermark is imperceptible, maintaining the diagnostic value of medical images. Extensive experiments under various attacks, including Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, and geometric distortions, demonstrate the methodology’s superior performance. The results reveal exceptional robustness, with high Normalized Correlation (NC) and Peak Signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values, outperforming existing techniques. Specifically, under Gaussian noise and rotation attacks, the watermark retrieved from the encrypted domain maintained an NC value close to 1.00, signifying near-perfect resilience. Even under severe attacks such as 30% cropping, the methodology exhibited a significantly higher NC compared to current state-of-the-art methods.