Applied image processing to multimedia information security

Information security has traditionally been ensured with data encryption and authentication techniques. Through the years, different generic data encryption standards have been developed. Although these encryption standards provide a high level of data protection, they are not efficient in the encryption of multimedia contents due to the large volume of digital image/video data. In order to address this issue, different image/video encryption methodologies have been developed. These methodologies encrypt only the key parameters of image/video data instead of encrypting the entire bit stream. In addition, researchers start to utilize information hiding techniques to augment the security level of data encryption methodologies. The future direction of multimedia information security will be on the clever interweaving of encryption, information hiding, and lossless compression to enhance the security of multimedia systems. This paper presents a state-of-the-technology review of these processes and suggests future research directions.