Enhancing security and privacy of chest X-ray images by implementing edge-based steganography and layered cryptography
Divya Sharma, Chander Prabha, Deepali Gupta, Sapna Juneja, Ali Nauman, Ghulam Muhammad · Alexandria Engineering Journal · 2025
Electronic medical images (EMIs) usage is growing with the smart city lifestyle, which allows access to data at any time and from any place. EMIs are transmitted over a communication medium or stored in third-party cloud servers, leading to security and privacy concerns. EMIs should be accessible in real-time without any loss to their image quality, as they are used by doctors to diagnose patients in case of medical emergencies. Chest X-ray images are of varying sizes and types, and multiple images are taken for a given patient at different stages of their illness. To enhance the security, integrity, and timely availability of EMIs while handling large and heterogeneous datasets of X-ray images, this paper presents a lightweight hybrid technique (LWHT) that applies edge-based steganography (EBS) followed by layered cryptography. The proposed lightweight crypto–stego technique is verified with several performance tests; it attains a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 82.51, a mean square error (MSE) of 5.6 × 10 −9 , a Pearson correlation (R) is 1, a structural similarity index metric (SSIM) of 0.9999, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0.005466, and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.057536. The robustness tests were performed after LWHT, applying common transformations such as rotation of image pixels and salt and pepper noise addition. The average encryption time (ET) is 0.347 sec, and the decryption time (DT) is 6.618 sec, respectively. Hence, the proposed method can maintain the security and integrity of X-ray images without limiting their real-time accessibility.