Efficient Compression of Encrypted Grayscale Images

Lossless compression of encrypted sources can be achieved through Slepian-Wolf coding. For encrypted real-world sources, such as images, the key to improve the compression efficiency is how the source dependency is exploited. Approaches in the literature that make use of Markov properties in the Slepian-Wolf decoder do not work well for grayscale images. In this correspondence, we propose a resolution progressive compression scheme which compresses an encrypted image progressively in resolution, such that the decoder can observe a low-resolution version of the image, study local statistics based on it, and use the statistics to decode the next resolution level. Good performance is observed both theoretically and experimentally.