Lossless embedding: A visually meaningful image encryption algorithm based on hyperchaos and compressive sensing

Abstract

A novel visually meaningful image encryption algorithm is proposed based on a hyperchaotic system and compressive sensing (CS), which aims to improve the visual security of steganographic image and decrypted quality. First, a dynamic spiral block scrambling is designed to encrypt the sparse matrix generated by performing discrete wavelet transform (DWT) on the plain image. Then, the encrypted image is compressed and quantified to obtain the noise-like cipher image. Then the cipher image is embedded into the alpha channel of the carrier image in portable network graphics (PNG) format to generate the visually meaningful steganographic image. In our scheme, the hyperchaotic Lorenz system controlled by the hash value of plain image is utilized to construct the scrambling matrix, the measurement matrix and the embedding matrix to achieve higher security. In addition, compared with other existing encryption algorithms, the proposed PNG-based embedding method can blindly extract the cipher image, thus effectively reducing the transmission cost and storage space. Finally, the experimental results indicate that the proposed encryption algorithm has very high visual security.