Visual Security Assessment via Saliency-Weighted Structure and Orientation Similarity for Selective Encrypted Images

Abstract

Selective encryption has been widely used in image privacy protection. Visual security assessment is necessary for the effectiveness and practicability of image encryption methods, and there have been a series of research studies on this aspect. However, these methods do not take into account perceptual factors. In this paper, we propose a new visual security assessment (VSA) by saliency-weighted structure and orientation similarity. Considering that the human visual perception is sensitive to the characteristics of selective encrypted images, we extract the structure and orientation feature maps, and then similarity measurements are conducted on these feature maps to generate the structure and orientation similarity maps. Next, we compute the saliency map of the original image. Then, a simple saliency-based pooling strategy is subsequently used to combine these measurements and generate the final visual security score. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public encryption databases, and the results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our proposed VSA compared with the existing most advanced work.