AbstractIn this article, we proposed a selective partial image encryption scheme of Secure JPEG2000 (JPSEC) for digital cinema or any other JPEG2000‐based applications. It makes a scalable encryption scheme possible on the basis of a trade‐off relationship between the encryption effect and the encryption cost. The encryption scheme was designed to activate during the image compression process, which is between quantization and entropy coding. Three data selection schemes were involved to select the parts of data to be encrypted: subband selection, data bit selection, and random selection of coefficients. The experimental results with over 3000 test images revealed that the PSNRs were between about 9.5 to 7.5 dB when the portion of the encrypted data by this scheme was between 1/4096 and 1/256. As the encryption effect is reasonably high with very low cost, the proposed scheme has high potential to provide secure communications in a variety of wired/wireless scenarios. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 20, 277‐284, 2010