Image encryption techniques: A comprehensive review

This paper presents an exhaustive review of research within the field of image encryption techniques. It commences with a general introduction to image encryption, providing an overview of the fundamentals. Subsequently, it explores a comprehensive exploration of chaos-based image encryption, encompassing various methods and approaches within this domain. These methods include full encryption techniques as well as selective encryption strategies, offering insights into their principles and applications. The authors place significant emphasis on surveying prior research contributions, shedding light on noteworthy developments within the field. Additionally, the paper addresses emerging challenges and issues that have arisen as a consequence of these advancements

Multi-Chaos-Based Lightweight Image Encryption-Compression for Secure Occupancy Monitoring

With the advancement of camera and wireless technologies, surveillance camera-based occupancy has received ample attention from the research community. However, camera-based occupancy monitoring and wireless channels, especially Wi-Fi hotspot, pose serious privacy concerns and cybersecurity threats. Eavesdroppers can easily access confidential multimedia information and the privacy of individuals can be compromised. As a solution, novel encryption techniques for the multimedia data concealing have been proposed by the cryptographers. Due to the bandwidth limitations and computational complexity, traditional encryption methods are not applicable to multimedia data. In traditional encryption methods such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Data Encryption Standard (DES), once multimedia data are compressed during encryption, correct decryption is a challenging task. In order to utilize the available bandwidth in an efficient way, a novel secure video occupancy monitoring method in conjunction with encryption-compression has been developed and reported in this paper. The interesting properties of Chebyshev map, intertwining map, logistic map, and orthogonal matrix are exploited during block permutation, substitution, and diffusion processes, respectively. Real-time simulation and performance results of the proposed system show that the proposed scheme is highly sensitive to the initial seed parameters. In comparison to other traditional schemes, the proposed encryption system is secure, efficient, and robust for data encryption. Security parameters such as correlation coefficient, entropy, contrast, energy, and higher key space prove the robustness and efficiency of the proposed solution

Efficient simultaneous encryption and compression of digital videos in computationally constrained applications

This thesis is concerned with the secure video transmission over open and wireless network channels. This would facilitate adequate interaction in computationally constrained applications among trusted entities such as in disaster/conflict zones, secure airborne transmission of videos for intelligence/security or surveillance purposes, and secure video communication for law enforcing agencies in crime fighting or in proactive forensics. Video content is generally too large and vulnerable to eavesdropping when transmitted over open network channels so that compression and encryption become very essential for storage and/or transmission. In terms of security, wireless channels, are more vulnerable than other kinds of mediums to a variety of attacks and eavesdropping. Since wireless communication is the main mode in the above applications, protecting video transmissions from unauthorized access through such network channels is a must. The main and multi-faceted challenges that one faces in implementing such a task are related to competing, and to some extent conflicting, requirements of a number of standard control factors relating to the constrained bandwidth, reasonably high image quality at the receiving end, the execution time, and robustness against security attacks. Applying both compression and encryption techniques simultaneously is a very tough challenge due to the fact that we need to optimize the compression ratio, time complexity, security and the quality simultaneously. There are different available image/video compression schemes that provide reasonable compression while attempting to maintain image quality, such as JPEG, MPEG and JPEG2000. The main approach to video compression is based on detecting and removing spatial correlation within the video frames as well as temporal correlations across the video frames. Temporal correlations are expected to be more evident across sequences of frames captured within a short period of time (often a fraction of a second). Correlation can be measured in terms of similarity between blocks of pixels. Frequency domain transforms such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) have both been used restructure the frequency content (coefficients) to become amenable for efficient detection. JPEG and MPEG use DCT while JPEG2000 uses DWT. Removing spatial/temporal correlation encodes only one block from each class of equivalent (i.e. similar) blocks and remembering the position of all other block within the equivalence class. JPEG2000 compressed images achieve higher image quality than JPEG for the same compression ratios, while DCT based coding suffer from noticeable distortion at high compression ratio but when applied to any block it is easy to isolate the significant coefficients from the non-significant ones. Efficient video encryption in computationally constrained applications is another challenge on its own. It has long been recognised that selective encryption is the only viable approach to deal with the overwhelming file size. Selection can be made in the spatial or frequency domain. Efficiency of simultaneous compression and encryption is a good reason for us to apply selective encryption in the frequency domain. In this thesis we develop a hybrid of DWT and DCT for improved image/video compression in terms of image quality, compression ratio, bandwidth, and efficiency. We shall also investigate other techniques that have similar properties to the DCT in terms of representation of significant wavelet coefficients. The statistical properties of wavelet transform high frequency sub-bands provide one such approach, and we also propose phase sensing as another alternative but very efficient scheme. Simultaneous compression and encryption, in our investigations, were aimed at finding the best way of applying these two tasks in parallel by selecting some wavelet sub-bands for encryptions and applying compression on the other sub-bands. Since most spatial/temporal correlation appear in the high frequency wavelet sub-bands and the LL sub-bands of wavelet transformed images approximate the original images then we select the LL-sub-band data for encryption and the non-LL high frequency sub-band coefficients for compression. We also follow the common practice of using stream ciphers to meet efficiency requirements of real-time transmission. For key stream generation we investigated a number of schemes and the ultimate choice will depend on robustness to attacks. The still image (i.e. RF’s) are compressed with a modified EZW wavelet scheme by applying the DCT on the blocks of the wavelet sub-bands, selecting appropriate thresholds for determining significance of coefficients, and encrypting the EZW thresholds only with a simple 10-bit LFSR cipher This scheme is reasonably efficient in terms of processing time, compression ratio, image quality, as well was security robustness against statistical and frequency attack. However, many areas for improvements were identified as necessary to achieve the objectives of the thesis. Through a process of refinement we developed and tested 3 different secure efficient video compression schemes, whereby at each step we improve the performance of the scheme in the previous step. Extensive experiments are conducted to test performance of the new scheme, at each refined stage, in terms of efficiency, compression ratio, image quality, and security robustness. Depending on the aspects of compression that needs improvement at each refinement step, we replaced the previous block coding scheme with a more appropriate one from among the 3 above mentioned schemes (i.e. DCT, Edge sensing and phase sensing) for the reference frames or the non-reference ones. In subsequent refinement steps we apply encryption to a slightly expanded LL-sub-band using successively more secure stream ciphers, but with different approaches to key stream generation. In the first refinement step, encryption utilized two LFSRs seeded with three secret keys to scramble the significant wavelet LL-coefficients multiple times. In the second approach, the encryption algorithm utilises LFSR to scramble the wavelet coefficients of the edges extracted from the low frequency sub-band. These edges are mapped from the high frequency sub-bands using different threshold. Finally, use a version of the A5 cipher combined with chaotic logistic map to encrypt the significant parameters of the LL sub-band. Our empirical results show that the refinement process achieves the ultimate objectives of the thesis, i.e. efficient secure video compression scheme that is scalable in terms of the frame size at about 100 fps and satisfying the following features; high compression, reasonable quality, and resistance to the statistical, frequency and the brute force attack with low computational processing. Although image quality fluctuates depending on video complexity, in the conclusion we recommend an adaptive implementation of our scheme. Although this thesis does not deal with transmission tasks but the efficiency achieved in terms of video encryption and compression time as well as in compression ratios will be sufficient for real-time secure transmission of video using commercially available mobile computing devices

Enhanced image encryption scheme with new mapreduce approach for big size images

Achieving a secured image encryption (IES) scheme for sensitive and confidential data communications, especially in a Hadoop environment is challenging. An accurate and secure cryptosystem for colour images requires the generation of intricate secret keys that protect the images from diverse attacks. To attain such a goal, this work proposed an improved shuffled confusion-diffusion based colour IES using a hyper-chaotic plain image. First, five different sequences of random numbers were generated. Then, two of the sequences were used to shuffle the image pixels and bits, while the remaining three were used to XOR the values of the image pixels. Performance of the developed IES was evaluated in terms of various measures such as key space size, correlation coefficient, entropy, mean squared error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and differential analysis. Values of correlation coefficient (0.000732), entropy (7.9997), PSNR (7.61), and MSE (11258) were determined to be better (against various attacks) compared to current existing techniques. The IES developed in this study was found to have outperformed other comparable cryptosystems. It is thus asserted that the developed IES can be advantageous for encrypting big data sets on parallel machines. Additionally, the developed IES was also implemented on a Hadoop environment using MapReduce to evaluate its performance against known attacks. In this process, the given image was first divided and characterized in a key-value format. Next, the Map function was invoked for every key-value pair by implementing a mapper. The Map function was used to process data splits, represented in the form of key-value pairs in parallel modes without any communication between other map processes. The Map function processed a series of key/value pairs and subsequently generated zero or more key/value pairs. Furthermore, the Map function also divided the input image into partitions before generating the secret key and XOR matrix. The secret key and XOR matrix were exploited to encrypt the image. The Reduce function merged the resultant images from the Map tasks in producing the final image. Furthermore, the value of PSNR did not exceed 7.61 when the developed IES was evaluated against known attacks for both the standard dataset and big data size images. As can be seen, the correlation coefficient value of the developed IES did not exceed 0.000732. As the handling of big data size images is different from that of standard data size images, findings of this study suggest that the developed IES could be most beneficial for big data and big size images

Entropy in Image Analysis II

Image analysis is a fundamental task for any application where extracting information from images is required. The analysis requires highly sophisticated numerical and analytical methods, particularly for those applications in medicine, security, and other fields where the results of the processing consist of data of vital importance. This fact is evident from all the articles composing the Special Issue "Entropy in Image Analysis II", in which the authors used widely tested methods to verify their results. In the process of reading the present volume, the reader will appreciate the richness of their methods and applications, in particular for medical imaging and image security, and a remarkable cross-fertilization among the proposed research areas