A crypto-watermarking system for ensuring reliability control and traceability of medical images

•We provide a system for ensuring medical image reliability and traceability.•The proposed system relies on the insertion of two watermarks.•Interferences in-between watermarks have been studied.•The overall performances of the proposed system have been evaluated and discussed.

In this paper, we propose a novel crypto-watermarking system for the purpose of verifying the reliability of medical images and tracing them, i.e. identifying the person at the origin of an illegal disclosure. This system couples a common watermarking method, based on Quantization Index Modulation (QIM), and a joint watermarking-decryption (JWD) approach. At the emitter side, it allows the insertion of a watermark as a proof of reliability of the image before sending it encrypted; at the reception, another watermark, a traceability proof, is embedded during the decryption process. The scheme we propose makes interoperate these two watermarking approaches taking into account risks of interferences between embedded watermarks, allowing the access to both reliability and traceability proofs. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of our system, and demonstrate it can be used to identify the origin of a disclosure even if the image has been altered.