A visually secure image encryption scheme based on compressive sensing

A novel visually secure image encryption scheme based on compressive sensing (CS) is proposed. Firstly, the plain image is transformed into wavelet coefficients, and then confused by a zigzag path and encrypted into a compressed cipher image using compressive sensing. Next, the cipher image is embedded into a carrier image, and finally a visually secure cipher image is obtained. SHA 256 hash function of the original image is generated to calculate the parameters for zigzag confusion and one-dimensional skew tent map, and the map is used to produce the measurement matrix for CS. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is highly sensitive to the plain image, and it can effectively withstand known-plaintext and chosen-plaintext attacks. Besides, our algorithm can achieve the image data security and image appearance security simultaneously, and the size of the cipher image and original image is equal, it does not require additional transmission bandwidth and storage space. Simulation results and performance analyses both demonstrate excellent encryption performance of the proposed encryption scheme.