Efficient Transparent JPEG2000 Encryption with Format-Compliant Header Protection

Transparent encryption allows the decoding of a preview image from the encrypted bitstream, even if the key is not available. We propose a lightweight partial encryption scheme that allows transparent encryption for JPEG2000. The proposed scheme efficiently encrypts JPEG2000 packet header information. The resulting bitstream is fully format-compliant. Apart from low computational complexity, the proposed scheme has several beneficial properties, e.g. it allows to perform tasks such as rate adaptation and visual hashing in the encrypted domain. We evaluate the security of the proposed approach and discuss possible attacks. The proposed approach succeeds in protecting the full quality version of the visual content reasonably well, especially considering its low computational demands.