Region-based Selective Compression and Selective Encryption of Medical Images

Abstract

Image compression and encryption1are two processes that enable telemedicine application of eHealth services. However, performing these operations on the whole content of an image is computationally expensive. This work proposes a method for selective compression and selective encryption of medical images. It is based on lossless compression and encryption of the region of interest (ROI) in medical images. The non-ROI part of the image is compressed in lossy mode and is stored or transmitted as plain data, in order to further reduce the image size and to avoid the computational cost of encrypting huge volumes of medical images. Our analysis shows that the proposed method provides the necessary security and is secured against various attacks. In addition, the compression savings achieved by the proposed method is about 28% while preserving the crucial information in the ROI for correct diagnosis. For a quality factor of 80%, the reconstructed image has a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 42.5 dB. The proposed method requires less computational resources and enables processing of huge volume of image data in low power network.

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