HF-TPE: High-Fidelity Thumbnail- Preserving Encryption

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 947 - 961
• Main Authors: Zhang, Yushu, Zhao, Ruoyu, Xiao, Xiangli, Lan, Rushi, Liu, Zhe, Zhang, Xinpeng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Balancing privacy and usability; Cloud computing; cloud storage; Encryption; Image detection; image encryption; Image quality; Indexes; Noise intensity; Privacy; Service introduction; Software; Storage; thumbnail; Thumbnail icons; Usability; User experience; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2021.3070348
• ISSN: 1051-8215

With the popularity of cloud storage services, people are increasingly accustomed to storing images in the cloud. However, cloud storage services raise privacy concerns, e.g., leakage of images to unauthorized third parties and service providers may exploit image detection technologies to portrait users without permission. Although privacy concerns can be solved by encrypting images before they are uploaded to the cloud, traditional encryption methods significantly affect the usability and user experience, for example, users cannot preview images in the cloud. Recently, Marohn et al. proposed two approximate thumbnail-preserving encryption schemes, called DRPE and TPE-LSB, to balance the privacy and usability of images in the cloud. However, both schemes have defects that either the decryption may fail or the ciphertext images have poor performance in perceived quality and too many noise points after decryption. To this end, we pertinently propose a high-fidelity thumbnail-preserving encryption scheme (HF-TPE). Compared with the previous works, on the one hand, the HF-TPE scheme not only ensures the correct decryption of ciphertext images, but also makes the ciphertext thumbnails more close to the plaintext images perceptually. On the other hand, the decrypted thumbnails have lower noise intensity and upper limit of the number of noises. In addition, simulation experiments further show that the HF-TPE scheme can guarantee users' usability.