Perceptual encryption with compression for secure vector map data processing

With the rapidly rising interest in geographic information system (GIS) contents, a large volume of valuable map data has been unlawfully distributed by pirates. Therefore, the secure storage and transmission of classified national digital map datasets have been increasingly threatened. As the importance of secure, large-volume map datasets has increased, vector map security techniques that focus on secure network and data encryption have been studied. These techniques are required to ensure access control and prevent illegal copying of digital maps. This paper presents perceptual encryption on the vector compression domain for copy protection and access control of vector maps. Our algorithm compresses all vector data of polylines and polygons by lossless minimum coding object (MCO) units and perceptually encrypts using two processes using the mean points and directions of MCOs. The first process changes the position of vector data by randomly permuting the mean points of MCOs, the so-called position encryption. The second process changes the geographic shape by circularly encrypting the directions of vertices in MCOs by the XOR operator. Experimental results have verified that our algorithm can encrypt GIS digital maps effectively and simply and can also improve the compression ratio, unlike general data encryption techniques, and thus, our algorithm is very effective for a large volume of GIS datasets.