This paper proposes a block-permutation-based encryption (BPBE) scheme for the encryption-then-compression (ETC) system that enhances the color scrambling. A BPBE image can be obtained through four processes, positional scrambling, block rotation/flip, negative-positive transformation, and color component shuffling, after dividing the original image into multiple blocks. The proposed scheme scrambles the R, G, and B components independently in positional scrambling, block rotation/flip, and negative-positive transformation, by assigning different keys to each color component. The conventional scheme considers the compression efficiency using JPEG and JPEG 2000, which need a color conversion before the compression process by default. Therefore, the conventional scheme scrambles the color components identically in each process. In contrast, the proposed scheme takes into account the RGB-based compression, such as JPEG-LS, and thus can increase the extent of the scrambling. The resilience against jigsaw puzzle solver (JPS) can consequently be increased owing to the wider color distribution of the BPBE image. Additionally, the key space for resilience against brute-force attacks has also been expanded exponentially. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can maintain the JPEG-LS compression efficiency compared to the conventional scheme. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by experiments and analyses.

An encryption scheme is proposed that considers hierarchies in media, such as text, images, sound, and so on, in a composite multimedia content to enable versatile access control. In the proposed scheme, a content provider has only one managed key (the master key) for a particular composite multimedia content, and an user who is permitted to access a reserved content entities in the composite content receives only one key that is subordinately generated from the master key. Another key generated from the identical master key is delivered to another user, and this permits the user to access different entities. This scheme introduces a new key concept, namely "unusable key," to keep all entities encrypted in a particular medium and to simultaneously decrypt several entities in other media. The other new key, "numbering key," is also used in this scheme to support simultaneous partial decryption of multiple images that are coded with a scalable coding technology. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme; in particular, the length of the managed master key and that of keys to be delivered to users are small.

In many multimedia applications, image encryption has to be conducted prior to image compression. This paper proposes a JPEG-friendly perceptual encryption method, which enables to be conducted prior to JPEG and Motion JPEG compressions. The proposed encryption scheme can provides approximately the same compression performance as that of JPEG compression without any encryption, where both gray scale images and color ones are considered. It is also shown that the proposed scheme consists of four block-based encryption steps, and provide a reasonably high level of security. Most of conventional perceptual encryption schemes have not been designed for international compression standards, but this paper focuses on applying the JPEG and Motion JPEG standards, as one of the most widely used image compression standards. In addition, this paper considers an efficient key management scheme, which enables an encryption with multiple keys to be easy to manage its keys.

In many multimedia applications, image encryption has to be conducted prior to image compression. This letter proposes an Encryption-then-Compression system using JPEG XR/JPEG-LS friendly perceptual encryption method, which enables to be conducted prior to the JPEG XR/JPEG-LS standard used as an international standard lossless compression method. The proposed encryption scheme can provides approximately the same compression performance as that of the lossless compression without any encryption. It is also shown that the proposed system consists of four block-based encryption steps, and provides a reasonably high level of security. Existing conventional encryption methods have not been designed for international lossless compression standards, but for the first time this letter focuses on applying the standards.

We propose a reversible data hiding (RDH) method in compressible encrypted images called the encryption-then-compression (EtC) images. The proposed method allows us to not only embed a payload in encrypted images but also compress the encrypted images containing the payload. In addition, the proposed RDH method can be applied to both plain images and encrypted ones, and the payload can be extracted flexibly in the encrypted domain or from the decrypted images. Various RDH methods have been studied in the encrypted domain, but they are not considered to be two-domain data hiding, and the resultant images cannot be compressed by using image coding standards, such as JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000. In our experiment, the proposed method shows high performance in terms of lossless compression efficiency by using JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000, data hiding capacity, and marked image quality.