Data Compression and Protection Through Representation With Combinations and Spiral Path

Abstract

We are living in Industry 4.0 era where enormous data need to be stored and processed. Though hardware is also becoming more abundant, its limitation in medium transmission speed and memory storage still beats this need. Therefore, data compression seems always an emerging necessity. Another big threat to data is also the unauthorized access especially while dealing with sensitive data. In this paper, we introduce an enhancement of a 2D signals compression with security tools through cryptography. Spiral path compression technique uses data representation through combinations to achieve satisfactory lossless compression rate but it also offers intrinsic encryption of data. Instead of representing an image as a matrix of pixels, we represent it through a group of index numbers, each belonging to a part of the image called mini-images. Every index is performed through a spiral path inside the mini-image starting from the most repeated pixel value. The histogram not only helps on defining these starting points of spirals but also decreases the number of bits needed to represent the index. Since there are many starting points possible for each mini-image, we use a random distribution to decide which of them to be selected. We also use a matrix of private keys to make possible the protection of the image from unauthorized use. We conclude that using this technique, we can achieve satisfactory compression rates compared to actual compression rates used nowadays and many other cryptographic possibilities are available for future studies.