Performance Analysis of Different Schemes for Transmission of Watermarked Medical Images over Fading Channels

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. In this thesis, we investigate different types of robust schemes for transmission of medical images with concealed patient information as a watermark. In these schemes, spatial domain digital watermarking technique is adapted to embed the patient information as a watermark into the lower order bits of the medical images to reduce the storage and transmission overheads. The watermark, which comprises text data, is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access of data. To enhance the robustness of the embedded information, the encrypted watermark is coded by concatenation of Reed Solomon (RS) and low density parity check (LDPC) codes. A robust scheme for transmission of watermarked images over impulsive noisy wireless channels is first proposed and its performance analyzed. In this scheme, the bursty wireless channel is simulated by adding impulse noise to the watermark embedded image. Furthermore, turbo channel coding is used to correct the transmission errors over impulsive noisy wireless channels. However, single input single output (SISO) channel capacity is not enough to provide modern wireless services such as data and multimedia messaging services. Further, it is not reliable due to multipath fading. To overcome these problems, a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme in which multiple antennas are used at both the transmitter and the receiver has emerged as one of the most significant technical breakthroughs in modern wireless iv communications. MIMO can improve the channel capacity and provide diversity gain. Hence, a scheme with a MIMO channel is proposed for the transmission of watermarked medical images over Rayleigh flat fading channels and its performance analyzed using MIMO maximum likelihood detector at the receiver. We present another scheme, namely, MIMO space frequency block coded OFDM (MIMO SFBC OFDM) in this thesis for transmission of watermarked medical images over Rayleigh fading channels to mitigate the detrimental effects due to frequency selective fading. The performance of this MIMO SFBC OFDM scheme is analyzed and compared with that of SISO-OFDM using minimum mean square error V-BLAST-based detection at the receiver. The efficacy of the different proposed schemes is illustrated through implementation results on watermarked medical images. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, He has been extremely encouraging and extraordinarily patient throughout my graduate study. I sincerely thank him for his interpretation of the texts in numerous places …