Image encryption based on the finite field cosine transform

•A novel image encryption scheme is proposed.•The technique involves two steps, where the finite field cosine transform is applied to blocks of an image.•The proposed scheme provides benefits related to computational complexity and encoding of the ciphered-images.

In this paper, a novel image encryption scheme is proposed. The technique involves two steps, where the finite field cosine transform is recursively applied to blocks of a given image. In the first step, the image blocks to be transformed result from the regular partition of subimages of the original image. The transformed subimages are regrouped and an intermediate image is constructed. In the second step, a secret-key determines the positions of the intermediate image blocks to be transformed. Besides complying with the main properties required by image encryption methods, the proposed scheme provides benefits related to computational complexity and encoding of the ciphered-images.