Light Weight Encryption for Medical Images
Abeer A. Abou Laimoon, Mustafa M. Abd Elnaby, Amr H. Hussein, Hatem Mohamed Abdul Kader · 2016
In medical images such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a lot of image information is created. Such images need a huge storage disk space and large bandwidth to be transmitted over the network. So, efficient storage and transmission technique is urgent to reduce the required storage capacity and transmission bandwidth. In this paper, an effective and low complexity transmission technique of medical images is proposed. Owing to the fact that in medical images, only a little partition of the image may be diagnostically useful, the medical image contents can be classified into two main parts; one for the region of interest (ROI) and the other for the non-region of interest (NON-ROI). The image containing the ROI is lossless compressed to save the important diagnostically details, while the image containing the remaining part (NON-ROI) is lossy compressed. The lossless compression allows the ROI reconstruction without losing any details. In addition to storage and bandwidth saving, the general compression techniques achieve an attractive level of security that permits secure transmission of the image in the restricted bandwidth over the network. Furthermore, to increase privacy and protect the important data from non-authorized access the region of interest is encrypted using strong encryption technique such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) technique. The encrypted ROI is lossless compressed before transmission after AES encryption process. The decompressed images are fused to reconstruct the entire image, at the receiving end.