Secure and Low-Complexity Medical Image Exchange Based on Compressive Sensing and LSB Audio Steganography

Abstract

Patients’ data constitutes the vast majority of information exchanged over the Internet.  The magnitude of maintaining its security and privacy directly correlates to the importance and privacy of the patients themselves.  The manipulation of this data negatively impacts the patient's life and treatment, thus the researchers were inclined to find solutions for this confidentiality challenge by concealing the data to prevent unauthorized access. The process of data concealment is more complex when dealing with large amounts of data. Often, the proportions of the medical image are sizable, which creates challenges when compressing data while maintaining high accuracy. In this paper, a system for securing and compressing medical images based on the Compressive Sensing (CS) principle is presented. The medical image is divided into 8×4 sub-matrices that are multiplied by a 3×8 sensor matrix consisting of Gaussian random numbers.  The proposed solution reduces the image's original size by about 30% and conceals it as a random distribution inside an audio (wav) file for more security, using the LSB technique for low complexity. For reconstruction, the sensed image is multiplied by the pseudo-inverse of Moore-Penrose. The statistical analysis proved the efficacy of the system in compression and recovery with reduced cost and time consumption, combined with reduced distortion of the cover file; it was also judged to be increasingly efficient compared to previous research.