Ultrahigh-security single-pixel semantic encryption

Single-pixel encryption is a recently developed encryption technique enabling the ciphertext amount to be decreased. It adopts modulation patterns as secret keys and uses reconstruction algorithms for image recovery in the decryption process, which are time-consuming and can easily be illegally deciphered if the patterns are exposed. We report an image-free single-pixel semantic encryption technique that significantly enhances security. The technique extracts semantic information directly from the ciphertext without image reconstruction, which significantly reduces computing resources for end-to-end real-time decoding. Moreover, we introduce a stochastic mismatch between keys and ciphertext, with random measurement shift and dropout, which effectively enhances the difficulty of illegal deciphering. Experiments on the MNIST dataset validate that 78 coupling measurements (0.1 sampling rate) with stochastic shift and random dropout achieved 97.43% semantic decryption accuracy. In the worst situation, when all the keys are illegally obtained by unauthorized attackers, only 10.80% accuracy can be achieved (39.47% in an ergodic manner).