Light-Weight Selective Image Encryption for Privacy Preservation

To protect personal privacy and confidential preservation, access control is used to authorize legal users for safe browsing the authorized contents on photos. The access control generates an authorization rule according to each permission assignment. However, the general access control is inappropriate to apply in some social services (e.g., photos posted on Flickr and Instagram, personal image management in mobile phone) because of the increasing popularity of digital images being stored and managed. With low maintenance loads, this paper integrates the data hiding technique to propose an access control mechanism for privacy preservation. The proposed scheme changes the partial regions of a given image as random pads (called selective image encryption) and only allows the authorized people to remedy the random pads back to meaningful ones which are with similar visual qualities of original ones.