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Abstract
Image information security is an important research direction in the field of information security. In existed image encryption schemes, original image is transformed to meaningless random noise signal which would draw attention and thus attract attacks. In this work, aiming to encrypt image to visually meaningful encrypted image, a novel image cryptosystem based on fractal graph generating is proposed which is called Visually Meaningful Image Encryption (VMIE) scheme. The VMIE scheme is to encrypt plain images into fractal scenery or fractal plant images by using fractal graph generation parameters as keys. According to these keys, receiver can get the plain image from fractal image by a reverse process. Based on the pixel value distribution characteristics of different plain images, different fractal transformations can be selected to produce different fractal images, which can better camouflage the plain images and make the encrypted plain images safer. In this paper, a new image encryption method is proposed, which is different from VMIE based on information hiding with limited hiding capacity, and from VMIE based on image sharing, which takes up a large amount of storage space and image size. Simulation experiments show that the proposed new scheme has low computation complexity and high security and the encrypted plain images have well understandability, strong resistance to compression and small data increase.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work was supported by the Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (grant numbers KJZD-K201801901 and KJQN201801904). The technology in this paper has been applied for the National Invention Patent of China (Application number: 201910163645.X).
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Funding
Notes on contributors
Sen Bai
Sen Bai is a Professor at the School of Software, Chongqing Institute of Engineering. He received the BSc degree in Mathematics from SiChuan University, China, in 1985. He received the MSc in Applied Mathematics and PhD in Control Theory & Control Engineering from Chongqing University, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. His research interests include information hiding, image encryption and deep learning. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Longfu Zhou
Longfu Zhou is an Associate Professor at the School of Software, Chongqing Institute of Engineering. He received the BSc degree in Computer Science and Technology from Hehai University, China, in 1992. He received the MSc in Software Engineering from Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2013. His research interests include information hiding, image encryption. Email: [email protected]
Mingzhu Yan
Mingzhu Yan received the MSc in Control Science and Engineering from Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2018, Her research interests include deep learning and image processing. She is currently in School of Medical Instrument and Food Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. Email: [email protected]
Xiaoyong Ji
Xiaoyong Ji is a Lecturer at the School of Software, Chongqing Institute of Engineering. He received the BSc and MSc degree in the Department of Information Engineering from Chongqing Communication Institute in 2012 and 2016, respectively. His research interests include information security and image processing. Email: [email protected]
Xuejiao Tao
Xuejiao Tao is an Associate Professor at the School of Software, Chongqing Institute of Engineering. She received the BSc degree in Computer Science and Technology from Central China Normal University, in 2006. She received the MSc in Software Engineering from Huazhong University of Science & Technology in 2010. Her research interests include information hiding, image encryption. Email: [email protected]