A symmetrical image encryption scheme in wavelet and time domain

• A novel image encryption algorithm is presented.
• The diffusion operation of encryption process is achieved in wavelet domain.
• Spatiotemporal chaos is used to encrypt wavelet coefficient matrix.

There has been an increasing concern for effective storages and secure transactions of multimedia information over the Internet. Then a great variety of encryption schemes have been proposed to ensure the information security while transmitting, but most of current approaches are designed to diffuse the data only in spatial domain which result in reducing storage efficiency. A lightweight image encryption strategy based on chaos is proposed in this paper. The encryption process is designed in transform domain. The original image is decomposed into approximation and detail components using integer wavelet transform (IWT); then as the more important component of the image, the approximation coefficients are diffused by secret keys generated from a spatiotemporal chaotic system followed by inverse IWT to construct the diffused image; finally a plain permutation is performed for diffusion image by the Logistic mapping in order to reduce the correlation between adjacent pixels further. Experimental results and performance analysis demonstrate the proposed scheme is an efficient, secure and robust encryption mechanism and it realizes effective coding compression to satisfy desirable storage.