Chin-Laung Lei1, Hung-Jr Shiu1, Bor-Sing Lin2, Chien-Hung Huang3, Pei-Ying Chiang4, Pei-Ying Chiang4. 1. DCNS Lab, Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei City 10617, Taiwan, ROC. 2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University, Taipei County 23741, Taiwan, ROC. 3. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Formosa University, Yunlin County 63201, Taiwan, ROC. Electronic address: chhuang@nfu.edu.tw. 4. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei City 10608, Taiwan, ROC. Electronic address: peiyingc@csie.ntut.edu.tw.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Physiological signals such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and electromyograms (EMG) are widely used to diagnose diseases. Presently, the Internet offers numerous cloud storage services which enable digital physiological signals to be uploaded for convenient access and use. Numerous online databases of medical signals have been built. The data in them must be processed in a manner that preserves patients' confidentiality. METHODS: A reversible error-correcting-coding strategy will be adopted to transform digital physiological signals into a new bit-stream that uses a matrix in which is embedded the Hamming code to pass secret messages or private information. The shared keys are the matrix and the version of the Hamming code. RESULTS: An online open database, the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, was used to test the proposed algorithms. The time-complexity, capacity and robustness are evaluated. Comparisons of several evaluations subject to related work are also proposed. CONCLUSIONS: This work proposes a reversible, low-payload steganographic scheme for preserving the privacy of physiological signals. An (n, m)-hamming code is used to insert (n - m) secret bits into n bits of a cover signal. The number of embedded bits per modification is higher than in comparable methods, and the computational power is efficient and the scheme is secure. Unlike other Hamming-code based schemes, the proposed scheme is both reversible and blind.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Physiological signals such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and electromyograms (EMG) are widely used to diagnose diseases. Presently, the Internet offers numerous cloud storage services which enable digital physiological signals to be uploaded for convenient access and use. Numerous online databases of medical signals have been built. The data in them must be processed in a manner that preserves patients' confidentiality. METHODS: A reversible error-correcting-coding strategy will be adopted to transform digital physiological signals into a new bit-stream that uses a matrix in which is embedded the Hamming code to pass secret messages or private information. The shared keys are the matrix and the version of the Hamming code. RESULTS: An online open database, the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, was used to test the proposed algorithms. The time-complexity, capacity and robustness are evaluated. Comparisons of several evaluations subject to related work are also proposed. CONCLUSIONS: This work proposes a reversible, low-payload steganographic scheme for preserving the privacy of physiological signals. An (n, m)-hamming code is used to insert (n - m) secret bits into n bits of a cover signal. The number of embedded bits per modification is higher than in comparable methods, and the computational power is efficient and the scheme is secure. Unlike other Hamming-code based schemes, the proposed scheme is both reversible and blind.