PRA-TPE: Perfectly Recoverable Approximate Thumbnail-Preserving Image Encryption

With the popularity of cloud servers, an increasing number of people are willing to store their images in the cloud due to many conveniences such as online browsing and managing images. On the other hand, this inevitably causes users’ concerns about image privacy leakage. Many image encryption schemes are proposed to prevent privacy leakage, while most of them focus only on privacy protection and ignore the usability of encrypted images. For this purpose, Marohn et al. (2017) designed two approximate thumbnail-preserving encryption (TPE) schemes to balance image privacy and usability. However, the decrypted image in these two schemes are only perceptually close to the original one and the original image cannot be perfectly recovered. To this end, we design a perfectly recoverable approximate TPE scheme in this paper, which combines reversibledata hiding (RDH) with encryption schemes. The thumbnails of the original and processed images are similar to balance image privacy and usability well. Meanwhile, the reversibility of RDH and encryption schemes is utilized to ensure the perfect recoverability in the proposed scheme. Experiments show that the proposed approximate TPE scheme is no longer limited to balancing usability and privacy but attains perfect recovery.