Image encryption techniques play a significant role in multimedia applications to secure and authenticate digital images. This paper presents a comprehensive study of various image encryption techniques. This paper covers the most significant developments in meta-heuristic based image encryption techniques. The various attacks and performance measures related to image encryption techniques have also been studied. The existing techniques are analyzed with respect to differential, statistical, and key analyses. The main goal of this paper is to give a broad perspective on characteristics of image encryption techniques. The paper concludes by discussing significant advancements in the field of image encryption and highlighting future challenges.

A Comprehensive Review on Image Encryption Techniques

Visually meaningful encryption for color images by using Qi hyper-chaotic system and singular value decomposition in YCbCr color space

A visually secure multiple image encryption using chaotic map and compressive sensing is proposed. The existing image encryption algorithms transform a secret image into a random noise like cipher image which can lead to cryptanalysis by an intruder. In the proposed method, compressive sampling is done using a chaos based, key controlled measurement matrix. An image dependent key generation scheme is used to generate the parameters of the chaotic map. The secret images are transformed into wavelet coefficients, and scrambled along a zigzag path, so that the high correlation among them can be reduced and thereby provide increased security level. The sparse coefficients are measured using the chaotic map-based measurement matrix, whose initial parameters are obtained from the keys generated. Then the reduced measurements are embedded into the sub-bands of the wavelet transformed cover image. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is highly sensitive to the secret images and can effectively withstand known-plaintext and chosen-plaintext attacks. Additionally, the cipher image and the secret images are of same size and do not require additional transmission bandwidth and storage space.

Visually meaningful image encryption using data hiding and chaotic compressive sensing

Visually meaningful image encryption (VMIE) means that a plain image is transformed into a visually meaningful cipher image which makes the plain image more imperceptible than the noise-like cipher image generated by traditional image encryption algorithms. In essence, existing VMIE algorithms exploit the idea of information steganography, i.e., embedding a secret into a host image to generate a cipher image which is visually similar to the original host image. However, it is well known that steganalysis technique is a fatal threat to steganography. Therefore, the security of existing VMIE algorithms will be potentially threatened by steganalysis technique. To improve the security of VMIE algorithms, we propose a new VMIE framework with dual embedding model. In the new framework an additional embedding phase is added. More specifically, in the first embedding process, the pre-encrypted image is embedded into the reference image to generate a visually meaningful reference cipher image. In the second embedding process, the difference between the visually meaningful reference cipher image and the original reference image is calculated to obtain a deviation matrix. Then, the deviation matrix is used as the disguised information and then embedded into the disguised host image to obtain a disguised visually meaningful encrypted image. The reference image can be any image with specified size thus ensuring the security of the VMIE algorithm. To verify the validity of the proposed VMIE framework, an example algorithm is proposed. Simulation results and performance analyses show that the example algorithm has a high time efficiency, high robustness and security.

Dual embedding model: a new framework for visually meaningful image encryption

In image steganography, least significant bits replacement and pixel value differencing methods have
been used. In this paper, data hiding methods based on least significant bits substitution are analyzed and
compared on the side of histogram attack. In comparative histogram analysis, histogram of stego image is
displayed considering the embedding capacity and visual image quality. Through histogram analysis, a new
image steganography will be designed that has a high embedding capacity and be robust to histogram attack.

/pdf/comparative-histogram-analysis-of-lsb-based-image-2ayn1s2lmc.pdf

Xingxing Wei

Papers

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