An Innovative Algorithm for Privacy Protection

in a Voice Disorder Detection System

Zulfiqar Ali1(B) , Muhammad Imran2 , Wadood Abdul3 ,

and Muhammad Shoaib2
1
Digital Speech Processing Group, Department of Computer Engineering,
College of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University,
Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
zuali@ksu.edu.sa
2
College of Computer and Information Science,
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
dr.m.imran@ieee.org, muhshoaib@ksu.edu.sa
3
Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer
and Information Science, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
aabdulwaheed@ksu.edu.sa

Abstract. Health information is critical for the patient and its unau-
thorized access may have server impact. With the advancement in the
healthcare systems especially through the Internet of Things give rises
to patient privacy. We developed a healthcare system that protects iden-
tity of patients using innovative zero-watermarking algorithm along with
vocal fold disorders detection. To avoid audio signal distortion, proposed
system embeds watermark in a secret key of identity by visual cryptogra-
phy rather than audio signal. The secret shares generated through visual
cryptography are inserted in the secret watermark key by computing
the features of audio signals. The proposed technique is evaluated using
audio samples taken from voice disorder database of the Massachusetts
Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI). Experimental results prove that the
proposed technique achieves imperceptibility with reliability to extract
identity, unaffected disorder detection result with high robustness. The
results are provided in form of Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCR), Bit
Error Rate (BER), and Energy Ratio (ENR).

1 Introduction

The privacy of patient’s health related information is always a serious concern

[1,2]. Health information can include patients’ demographics with administra-
tive and legal clinical massages which are stored, managed and transmitted
electronically. The main objective of the research is to design and implement
a protected health diagnostic system and to detect vocal fold disorders. The
proposed protected healthcare system has two main modules. The first module
ensures the privacy of an audio sample implemented with zero-watermarking,

c Springer International Publishing AG 2018

A.V. Samsonovich and V.V. Klimov (eds.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA)
for Young Scientists, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 636,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63940-6 32
 An Innovative Algorithm for Privacy Protection 229

whereas the second module is responsible for the detection of voice disor-
der in an audio sample implemented with Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients
(MFCC) extraction method with Support Vector Machine (SVM). To the best
of our knowledge, existing research lacks with using zero-watermarking to audio
medical signals and their after attack diagnostic accuracy. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 describes implementation of two modules.
Section 3 details the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm with embedding and
extracting processes. Section 4 provides the results. Finally, Sect. 5 presents some
conclusions.

2 Proposed Implementation in Healthcare System

The proposed healthcare system consists of two modules: the privacy protec-
tion and disorder detection. The main components used to secure privacy in
Module 1 are the image generation for subject identity, feature extraction for
zero-watermarking, and creation of secret shares for subjects’ identities through
visual cryptography. Whereas, Module 2 consists of the speech extraction fea-
tures from audio samples of normal and dysphonic subjects by applying the
1D-LBP operator [3,4], and pattern matching for automatic diagnosis of a voice
disorder by implementation of SVM. The audio samples are taken from a voice
disorder database recorded at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI)
voice and speech laboratory [5] which has been used in a number of previous
studies [6–11].

3 Proposed Zero-Watermarking Algorithm

The proposed zero-watermarking algorithm used to protect the subject’s pri-
vacy is implemented in Module 1. The features selected into audio samples are
determined by analyzing the histograms of the computed 1D-LBP codes. Then
embedding is implemented to insert the identity of a subject is shown (Fig. 1).
To recover the identity, two healthcare staff has the keys and transmitted audios
as shown (Figs. 2 and 3)

Fig. 1. Embedding process to insert identity of the proposed algorithm.

230 Z. Ali et al.

Fig. 2. Watermark extraction process.

Fig. 3. Evaluation of patient’s voice signal.

4 Experimental Results and Discussion

In the proposed disorder detection system, Module 2 is implemented with MFCC
and SVM which consist of two phases: the training phase and the testing phase.
The training phase takes labeled audio samples and extracts MFCC features.
Then, SVM generates the model for each type of subject by using the computed
features. The testing phase takes unlabeled/unknown audio samples and calcu-
lates the MFCC features. Then, SVM uses these features to predict the class of
unknown audio samples through pattern matching. The frame size for MFCC is
512 samples, a hamming window with 512 points, and 29 band-pass filters are
used in a Mel-spaced filter bank. The performance is measured by: sensitivity
(SEN), specificity (SPE), and accuracy (ACC) as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Performance result for disorder detection

Kernel % SEN ± STD % SPE ± STD %ACC ± STD AUC

Linear 96.32 ± 4.1 81.96 ± 6.7 90.64 ± 5.8 0.89
RBF 98.72 ± 2.2 83.22 ± 8.3 92.39± 4.4 0.95

The parameters NCR (Normalized Cross-Correlation), BER (Bit Error

Rate), and ENR (Energy Ratio), given by Eqs. (1), (2) and (3), for the audio
sample of patient identity are 1,0, and 1, respectively. These parameters are
 An Innovative Algorithm for Privacy Protection 231

computed for different audio samples of the MEEI subset database as shown
in Table 2. The experimental results validated the performance of the proposed
algorithm.
a b
SID (i, j)SID (i, j)
N CR(SID , SID ) = 
i=1 j=1
 12   12 (1)
a b 2 a b 2
i=1 j=1 SID (i, j) i=1 j=1 SID (i, j)

t
BER(%) = × 100 (2)
a×b
a b
i=1 j=1 SID (i, j)
EN R = a b (3)
i=1 SID (i, j)
j=1

where SID and SID are original and retrieved patient’s identities, respectively.
The parameter t represents the number of erroneously extracted bits and a × b
is the dimension of SID image.

Table 2. Performance of the proposed algorithm for the M EEIsubset

Modules Performance Parameters

Module 1 NCR: 1 BER: 0 ENR: 1
(proposed
algorithm)
Module 2 SEN: 98.72% ± 2.2 SPE: 83.22% ± 8.3 ACC:92.39% ± 4.4 AUC:0.95
(disorder
detection)

In the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm the identity is inserted into

the secret key instead of the audio sample to avoid inaccurate diagnosis. Table 3
shows imperceptibility analysis with SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) of host audio
and watermarked audio implemented in module 1along with and SEN, SPE,
ACC, and AUC implemented in module 2.

Table 3. Performance analysis of the proposed algorithm for imperceptibility

Modules Performance parameters

Module 1 SNR:inf
(proposed
algorithm)
Module 2 SEN: 98.72%±2.2 SPE: 83.22%±8.3 ACC:92.39%±4.4 AUC:0.95
(disorder
detection)
232 Z. Ali et al.

Detection reliability examines whether the proposed zero-watermarking algo-

rithm has the undesired property of watermark extraction by using secret keys
of a different subject. The proposed algorithm detects the identity of a subject
reliably, and a key of a different subject cannot be used to disclose the identity of
some other subject. The proposed algorithm is robust against malicious attacks.
The results of the proposed algorithm after adding the white-Gaussian noise in
the watermarked audio sample with identity extracted from the attacked audio
sample SID and original identity SID is shown in Table 4.

Table 4. The performance of the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm for noise

attack

dB NCR BER ENR Diagnosis

No 1 0 1 True
60 0.99 1.11 0.98 True
50 0.98 3.01 0.95 True
40 0.92 9.64 0.85 True
30 0.81 22.61 0.65 false

5 Conclusion
In this paper, a secure healthcare system is developed implemented with the
proposed zero-watermarking algorithm, which generates two secret shares of a
subject’s identity using visual cryptography. Our proposed zero-watermarking
algorithm distinguish with traditional approach is that it will not intervene with
audio samples as the secret shares of the identity are embedded into the secret
keys instead of the host audio to avoid probable audio degradation with and
diagnostic accuracy. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using the MEEI voice
disorder database. The experimental results validated the reliability to detect of
a subject’s identity and robustness against noise attacks.

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