A Novel Hyper Chaotic-Cellular Automata Based Medical Image Encryption Technique

The security of healthcare and telemedicine systems stands as a matter of paramount importance, necessitating extensive research. In the upcoming years, the medical industry envisions widespread adoption of advanced telemedicine applications. With healthcare smart devices becoming increasingly interconnected through the Internet, enabling convenient access from any location, the protection of sensitive and private information, such as personal medical images, emerges as a critical focal point. As a result, the encryption of medical images assumes a pivotal role within the domain of telemedicine and healthcare applications. This article introduces a highly efficient cryptographic system designed to enhance the protection of medical images by harnessing the power of cellular automata techniques in conjunction with hyper-chaotic procedures. In the proposed medical image encryption technique, a layered cellular automata approach is embraced, and a pseudorandom sequence derived from a four-dimensional hyper-chaotic system is employed as the cryptographic key. The study encompasses both grayscale and color images. Several assessment criteria, including the Number of Changing Pixel Rate (NPCR), Unified Averaged Changed Intensity (UACI), average entropy, correlation coefficients, Structural Similarity (SSIM), Feature Similarity (FSIM), and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), are employed to evaluate the suggested cryptosystem. These evaluations vividly underscore the robust security performance exhibited by the proposed approach.