An Effective Mechanism for the Secure Transmission of Medical Images Using Compression and Public Key Encryption Mechanism

Abstract

AbstractIn medical image applications, the diagnostic observations of a patient are transmitted to a remote location through internet. Since the information being transmitted is really sensitive as far as the diagnosis is concerned, the security of the image is a major concern. The size of the image being transmitted is another major concern in the scenario. We propose a methodology to mitigate problems relating to both security and size of image. The proposed mechanism first compresses the image to reduce its size using a lossless compression mechanism. The compressed image is then encrypted using the well-known public key cryptography algorithm ECC to ensure its security. The encrypted cipher image is transmitted to the remote center where the image undergoes decryption and decompression mechanisms to generate the actual image. The performance analysis shows that the system works well and is effective in ensuring the security of the image.KeywordsImage encryptionPublic key cryptographyECC