A Novel Perceptual Image Encryption Scheme Using Geometric Objects Based Kernel

The wide use of digital images and videos in various applications warrant serious attention to the security and privacy issues today. Several encryption techniques have been proposed in recent years as feasible solutions to the protection of digital images and videos. In many applications, such as pay-per-view videos, pay-TV and video on demand, one of the required features is that the quality of the video data be degraded only partially by some encryption technique and the encrypted data must still be partially perceptible. This feature referred to as ‘Perceptual encryption’ is the encryption algorithm that degrades the quality of media content according to security or quality requirements. In this work we propose a simple yet efficient technique for realizing perceptual encryption using geometric objects as kernels based on which the pixels are permuted. Confusion aspect that is required is realized by inserting the kernel on the image and thereby performing transposition of pixels based on the kernel formed out of geometric objects. The various parameters of geometric objects, number of objects and the position of the objects/kernel in the image are used as the key for encryption and later on for decryption. Further a choice of quality of the image required i.e., different levels of degradation is provided by adjusting the above parameters of the objects/kernel. From the results obtained it is evident that the proposed method which is more apt for perceptual encryption can also be used effectively for full image encryption with acceptable level of security.