Primitively visually meaningful image encryption: A new paradigm.

Traditional image encryption schemes turn images with rich visual contents into meaningless noise-like ones. This assures privacy security at the expense of visual meaning. To cope with this issue, an encryption method called visually meaningful image encryption (VMIE), by which the encrypted image can have visual meaning, is proposed to protect image privacy and visual observability. This visual meaning, however, is unrelated to the original image, which, like traditional encryption, compromises the primitively visual meaning. Motivated by this, we investigate the term 'visual meaning' in depth and suggest a new VMIE paradigm, namely, primitively visually meaningful image encryption, as well as accompanying goals. A novel permutation-diffusion architecture is specifically designed to match the paradigm, which can preserve the primitively visual meaning in the encrypted image. Furthermore, the prototype of this paradigm is constructed using a chaotic system and DNA coding. It is then applied to do experiments to demonstrate the superiority of this work. It should be observed that the primitively visual meaning is preserved and of good quality in the encrypted image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]