Selectively Partial Encryption of Images in Wavelet Domain
Young Ho Seo, Dong Uk Kim · 2003
As the usage of image/video contents increase, a security problem for the payed image data or the ones requiring confidentiality is raised. This paper proposed an image encryption methodology to hide the image information. The target data of it is the result from quantization in wavelet domain. This method encrypts only part of the image data rather than the whole data of the original image, in which three types of data selection methodologies were involved. First, by using the fact that the wavelet transform decomposes the original image into frequency sub-bands, only some of the frequency sub-bands were included in encryption to make the resulting image unrecognizable. In the data to represent each pixel, only MSBs were taken for encryption. Finally, pixels to be encrypted in a specific sub-band were selected randomly by using LFSR(Linear Feedback Shift Register). Part of the key for encryption was used for the seed value of LFSR and in selecting the parallel output bits of the LFSR for random selection so that the strength of encryption algorithm increased. The experiments have been performed with the proposed methods implemented in software for about 500 images, from which the result showed that only about 1/1000 amount of data to the original image can obtain the encryption effect not to recognize the original image. Consequently, we are sure that the proposed are efficient image encryption methods to acquire the high encryption effect with small amount of encryption. Also, in this paper, several encryption scheme according to the selection of the sub-bands and the number of bits from LFSR outputs for pixel selection have been proposed, and it has been shown that there exits a relation of trade-off between the execution time and the effect of the encryption. It means that the proposed methods can be selectively used according to the application areas. Also, because the proposed methods are performed in the application layer, they are expected to be a good solution for the end-to-end security problem, which is appearing as one of the important problems in the networks with both wired and wireless sections.