Image encryption and compression based on kronecker compressed sensing and elementary cellular automata scrambling

Because of simple encryption and compression procedure in single step, compressed sensing (CS) is utilized to encrypt and compress an image. Difference of sparsity levels among blocks of the sparsely transformed image degrades compression performance. In this paper, motivated by this difference of sparsity levels, we propose an encryption and compression approach combining Kronecker CS (KCS) with elementary cellular automata (ECA). In the first stage of encryption, ECA is adopted to scramble the sparsely transformed image in order to uniformize sparsity levels. A simple approximate evaluation method is introduced to test the sparsity uniformity. Due to low computational complexity and storage, in the second stage of encryption, KCS is adopted to encrypt and compress the scrambled and sparsely transformed image, where the measurement matrix with a small size is constructed from the piece-wise linear chaotic map. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our proposed scrambling method based on ECA has great performance in terms of scrambling and uniformity of sparsity levels. And the proposed encryption and compression method can achieve better secrecy, compression performance and flexibility.