Cluster

Introduction

Inspired by the natural ripple-like phenomenon that distorts a reflection on a water surface, this paper introduces a new symmetric image cipher using wave perturbations to shuffle images in an n dimensional (n D) space. Its strong diffusion and confusion properties are ensured by pseudo-random wavefronts and additional salts and peppers bits. To improve the image cipher׳s confusion and diffusion properties, it introduced the additional pseudo-noise and diffusion chaining. These improvements require a low computational cost but guarantee a uniform distribution for 0-bits and 1-bits. Simulation results have shown that the proposed cipher is a fast solution to protect image contents, outperforms several existing methods, and has higher randomness and more evenly distributed pixels.

Main results

Discretization of wave perturbations for digital images. (a) Continuous wavefronts (blue curves) and discrete zero-wavefront (stems), and (b) discrete wavefronts. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure caption, the reader is referred to the web version of this paper.)

Image scrambling using wave perturbations. (a) Original peppers image. The IS results using a wave propagating along the (b) x-axis and (c) y-axis directions.

n D-WPIC effects on image Lenna.

Image scrambling using various methods (images in the 1st and 3rd rows are sizes of 256×256×3 and 512×512×3, respectively). (a) original images and their histograms. Scrambled images and their histograms using the (b) classic method, (c) Ye׳s method, (d) Fu׳s method, and (e) proposed n D-WPIC.

Reference:

Yue Wu, Yicong Zhou, Sos Agaian, and Joseph P. Noonan, “A Symmetric Image Cipher using Wave Perturbations,” Signal Processing, vol. 102, pp. 122–131, 2014.