Development of Secure and Novel Methods of Image Encryption Using an Image as Key

Abstract

Encryption is one of the proven methods for securing documents from unauthorized access. Image Encryption can be applied to documents that are scanned and saved as images. Many text encryption methods are available but are not suitable for documents in image format. Three methods for image encryption are proposed in this article. Key Bitplane Encryption, Key Scan Encryption, and Key RGB Displacement Encryption are the proposed methods for encrypting images. All of these methods share the idea of using an image as the key to encrypt another image. These algorithms are examined for color and grayscale images, as well as for images of various sizes.  The three methods outlined in the paper are examined for brute force and common attack types. For each method, a comparison using statistical methods is also given. The methods are implemented in Matlab, and the test images come from the Computer Vision Group Database.