Pixel-Based Image Encryption Without Key Management for Privacy-Preserving Deep Neural Networks

We present a novel privacy-preserving scheme for deep neural networks (DNNs) that enables us not to only apply images without visual information to DNNs but to also consider the use of independent encryption keys for both training and testing images for the first time. In this paper, a novel pixel-based image encryption method that maintains important features of original images is proposed for privacy-preserving DNNs. For training, a DNN model is trained with images encrypted by using the proposed method with independent encryption keys. For testing, the model enables us to apply both encrypted images and plain images for image classification. Therefore, there is no need to manage keys. In addition, the proposed method allows us to perform data augmentation in the encrypted domain. In an experiment, the proposed method is applied to well-known networks, that is, deep residual networks and densely connected convolutional networks, for image classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, under the use of independent encryption keys, can maintain a high classification performance, and it is robust against ciphertext-only attacks (COAs). Moreover, the results confirm that the proposed scheme is able to classify plain images as well as encrypted images, even when data augmentation is carried out in the encrypted domain.