A visually secure image encryption method based on integer wavelet transform and rhombus prediction

• Published in: Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 1722 - 1739
• Main Authors: Chen, Xianyi, Zou, Mengling, Yang, Bin, Wang, Zhenli, Wu, Nannan, Qi, Lili
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States AIMS Press 07.02.2021
• Subjects: discrete wavelet transform; image encryption; rhombus prediction; visually meaningful; discrete wavelet transform; visually meaningful; rhombus prediction; image encryption
• ISSN: 1551-0018; 1551-0018
• DOI: 10.3934/mbe.2021089

Traditional image encryption technology usually encrypts a normal image into a noise matrix, which can protect the image in a certain extent, but noise appearance is easy to arouse the suspicion of attackers. To avoid this problem, a method of encrypting image into carrier image with visual meaning is proposed. Inspired by the existing visually secure encryption technique, we proposed an improved method based on the integer wavelet transform (IWT) and prediction scheme. The secret image is hidden in the high frequency coefficients of IWT to achieve good invisibility, and prediction error are used to replace the pixels of the carrier image to improve the final image quality. Experimental results and analysis show that the quality of the encrypted image is 3.5 dB better than that of the previous ones.