Usability Enhanced Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption Based on Data Hiding for JPEG Images

As an increasing number of people tend to upload personal images to cloud platforms such as iCloud, Google Drive, and Baidu Cloud, the issue of image privacy protection in clouds has attracted widespread attention. Thumbnail-preserving encryption (TPE) is a newly proposed technology especially for balancing usability and privacy of images stored in clouds. The TPE-encrypted image does not reveal anything other than the thumbnail and size of the original one. Although many well-designed TPE schemes have been put forward, they almost all operate in the spatial domain and are not compatible with JPEG images. The only two schemes that can be applied in the frequency domain were proposed by Wright et al. and Marohn et al., but both of them have disadvantages and do not consider non-visual usability. In this paper, we propose a usability enhanced TPE scheme especially for JPEG images by utilizing reversible data hiding and image encryption in the frequency domain. We first transform the original image into the frequency domain and select some specific locations for extra information recording in every block. The original coefficient values at the selected locations are then collected and embedded into the rest of the block before encryption. Finally, the extra information is expected to be recorded into the selected locations of every block for non-visual usability. Experiments confirm that the proposed scheme achieves the target of balancing enhanced usability and privacy.