A robust ECG steganography method

ECG steganography hides patient's confidential data into their Electrocardiogram during transmission/storage of medical records, in order to ensure protection of patient privacy. Efficiency of a steganography method can be estimated using imperceptibility and robustness of hidden data which are estimated using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Bit Error Rate metrics, respectively. In this research work, an attempt has been made to perform ECG steganography using Discrete Wavelet Transform - Singular Value Decomposition method with additive quantization scheme. A vital challenge in steganography is that affects the imperceptibility and robustness of watermark. The novelty of proposed work is that improves the robustness of hidden data using BCH error-correcting codes. MIT-BIH database is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed ECG steganography method. It is observed that the robustness of hidden data is improved owing to BCH codes.

I. Introduction

Emerging technologies of medical devices enables ubiquitous monitoring in healthcare domain where patient's medical information tagged with their personal identity are transmitted to remotely located healthcare service provider over the internet. In such applications, protection of patient's privacy is an essential requirement owing to the threat by internet hackers [1]. Steganography provides secured data transmission by hiding data into cover information. However, steganography process modifies the cover medical information that affects diagnosability and retrieval of hidden data. Hence, a vital challenge in ECG steganography is to preserve diagnosability of ECG signal and yet achieve full retrieval of watermark.