Comparative Assessment of Existing Meaningful Image Encryption Techniques

In recent trends, digital images are commonly used for communication, storage, medical imaging, etc. These images may contain confidential data. Image encryption and steganography are popular techniques to provide information security. In image encryption, a secret image is encoded using an encryption key, and in image steganography, a secret image is embedded in some cover media. Encrypted images are visually recognizable as these are noise-like, but stego images are visually unrecognizable. In this concern, some visually secure encryption techniques are developed, known as Meaningful Image Encryption (MIE). It includes the advantages of both image encryption and steganography. This paper provides a thorough review of existing MIE techniques. A comparative assessment based on various performance parameters is presented. Further, this paper provides the main application areas of MIE techniques. Moreover, the future research perspective to enhance the existing MIE techniques are discussed in detail.