Protection of microscopy images through digital watermarking techniques

Nowadays microscopy confocal images are becoming more and more a fundamental tool for many application fields, including biology, forensic analysis, medicine, industrial research, etc.. Therefore, as it is easy to note, given the contexts in which such images have to operate, their protection, or at least their non alterability, is a very challenging problem in many fields. Although these problems are deeply felt, in the state of the art does not exist digital watermarking techniques for such types of images. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme well-suited for the embedding of digital watermarks into confocal microscopy image sequences. This work, to the best of our knowledge is the first one which addresses the protection of such images type. The preliminary test results show that the scheme we propose is fairly resistant against the lossy compression attack, by providing a good trade-off between robustness and computational complexity.