Visually Meaningful Image Encryption

Now-a-days, lots of images, which are very personal or confidential, are being transmitted over the internet either among individuals or companies. At the same time, attacks on those images are also increasing day-by-day. Hence to protect the contents of the image, many image encryption algorithms are evolving where most of them transform the original image to a noise-like or texture -like image. But this is an obvious visual sign indicating the presence of an encrypted image and thus results in a significantly large number of attacks. To overcome this problem, our algorithm generates a new image encryption concept to transform an original image into a visually meaningful encrypted one where a visually meaningful or good-looking encrypted image (VMEI) is produced that has a high possibility of being treated as an encrypted one. This would significantly reduce the risk of an encrypted image being attacked and modified. The algorithm also uses Lifting wavelet transform for further enhancement of the VMEI. At last the image sharpening is done to enhance the final image.