Most of today’s techniques encrypt all of the image data, which consumes a tremendous amount of time and computational payload. This work introduces a selective image encryption technique that encrypts predetermined bulks of the original image data in order to reduce the encryption/decryption time and the
computational complexity of processing the huge image data. This technique is applying a compression algorithm based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Two approaches are implemented based on color space conversion as a preprocessing for the compression phases YCbCr and RGB, where the resultant compressed sequence is selectively encrypted using randomly generated combined secret key.
The results showed a significant reduction in image quality degradation when applying the system based on YCbCr over RGB, where the compression ratio was raised in some of the tested images to 50% for the same Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The usage of 1-D DCT reduced the transform time by 47:1 times compared
to the same transform using 2-D DCT. The values of the adaptive scalar quantization parameters were reduced to the half for the luminance (Y band) to preserve the visual quality, while the chrominance (Cb and Cr bands) were quantized by the predetermined quantization parameters. In the hybrid encoder horizontal zigzag,
block scanning was applied to scan the image. The Detailed Coefficient (DC) coefficients are highly correlated in this arrangement- where DC are losslessly compressed by Differential Pulse Coding Modulation (DPCM) and the
Accumulative Coefficients (AC) are compressed using Run Length Encoding (RLE). As a consequence, for the compression algorithm, the compression gain obtained was up to 95%. Three arrays are resulted from each band (DC coefficients, AC values, and AC runs), where the cipher is applied to some or all of those bulks
selectively. This reduces the encryption decryption time significantly, where encrypting the DC coefficients provided the second best randomness and the least encryption/decryption time recorded (3 10-3 sec.) for the entire image. Although the compression algorithm consumes time but it is more efficient than the saved
encryption time.
