Medical record protection with improved grde data hiding method on audio files

The rapid development of the network technology and internet have changed the way of how files are distributed, including sensitive data such as medical record. Some methods have been applied to ensure its security, including those with cryptography or steganography, along with their advantages and disadvantages. While cryptography may attract suspiciousness of attackers, steganography may not. This is because the file being sent is similar to ordinary files. Therefore, this similarity is one of the key factor in this data hiding problem, besides the capacity of the secret message which can be fully accommodated. In this paper, we propose a data hiding scheme by using audio files as the cover (carrier) to hide the medical record and to secure it. In order to maximize the embedding capacity of the method while maintaining good quality, we combine the Reduced Difference Expansion with Generalized Difference Expansion methods. In addition, we further enhance the method by reducing the difference to achieve a better quality result; and applying a multiple layer embedding scheme, so that same sample can be used for embedding multiple times. For the proposed scheme, the result is quite satisfactory with a 320.0000 bit of payload data can be embedded into 10 second audio clip while still maintaining the quality by 37dB of PSNR value.