Secure image distribution based on joint decryption and fingerprinting

Abstract

In this paper, a secure image distribution scheme is proposed, which transmits the encrypted image to different customers and makes each customer decrypt the image into a different copy. At sender side, the image is preprocessed by the proposed preprocessing method, then encrypted with the proposed sequence encryption, and finally transmitted to customers. At customer side, the received image is decrypted, with the proposed joint decryption and fingerprinting method, into a copy that contains the customer's unique information (e.g. customer ID). The implementation for JPEG image is presented, which combines the proposed scheme with JPEG encoding/decoding. Thus, the encryption/decryption process can be implemented together with JPEG encoding/decoding process. In experiments, the performances, including security, imperceptibility, robustness and efficiency, are evaluated. The analysis and experiments show that the proposed scheme is more secure compared with the existing scheme, it obtains good imperceptibility and robustness, and it affects JPEG compression slightly. These properties make it a suitable choice for secure image distribution in real time applications.