A partial image encryption scheme based on DWT and texture segmentation

Abstract

nowadays, image encryption is an interesting research area due to the rapid growth of communication technologies and the increasing demands for safeguarding the privacy of the transmitted images as unencrypted images are vulnerable to interception. Partial encryption is used to overcome the challenge of encryption the large size of digital images, due to the large computational overhead and long processing time needed. In this research, one level Discrete Wavelet Transform is applied to a colored image to divide the image to four sub-bands; then a texture segmentation using a Gabor filter and K-means clustering is applied to lowest frequency band. To achieve that, the texture segmentation is used as a new method for scrambling the image based on the features of another image. Finally, the scrambled segments of the image are encrypted using interchanged AES and RC4 Algorithms. Each one of the image pixels is then XORed using one of the two algorithms and the key of the other algorithm. The proposed work is evaluated using several security and performance analysis tests. The results show that the proposed work is resistant agents many kinds of attack and promising in real-time image transmission and encryption.