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IHSCICONF2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1003 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012036 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1003/1/012036

Medical image security using modified chaos-based

cryptography approach

Methaq Talib Gatta and Shahad Thamear Abd Al-latief

Computer Science Department, University of Mustansiriya, Baghdad, Iraq

Abstract. The progressive development in telecommunication and networking

technologies have led to the increased popularity of telemedicine usage which involve
storage and transfer of medical images and related information so security concern is
emerged. This paper presents a method to provide the security to the medical images
since its play a major role in people healthcare organizations. The main idea in this
work based on the chaotic sequence in order to provide efficient encryption method
that allows reconstructing the original image from the encrypted image with high
quality and minimum distortion in its content and doesn’t effect in human treatment
and diagnosing. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed method
using some of statistical measures and robust correlation between original image and
decrypted image.

1. Introduction
Recently; hospitals and medicinal appliances produce images in digital forms with the ability
of storing and transfer these images electronically which improves the efficiency of the health
care services institution [1]. These images plays a prime role in evaluate the oddity in the human
body and have its importance to provide accurate diagnosing with only a still image “A Picture
worth Thousand Words"[2].With the remarkable development in communication technologies
and the need of fast and secure treatments from remote location lead to phenomenal growth in
the number of medical images that are transmitted daily [3] in to the open network, this result
in many threat to these images by malicious attacks so the security of these medical image is
essential and require reliable, fast and powerful security system [4]. There is no single
encryption algorithm that is suitable for all image types, many popular encryption standard have
been proposed such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Data Encryption Standard
(DES), these standards are designed to the textual data encryption and the message can be
decrypted by using the same key used for encryption so it is poorly suitable to the image
encryption because it doesn’t meet the image requirements such as redundancy, high data
capacity, strong correlation between pixels [5]. There are many researchers noticed the strong
relationship between the chaos theory and the cryptography systems which can be used to
achieve the desired level of image security because of the chaotic system strong properties
such as high sensitivity to the initial conditions and parameters ,aperiodicity, etc. any successful
cryptosystem must have the diffusion and confusion effects, in order to be robust against several
attacks[6],the chaos-based cryptography can achieve these two effects[7]. In this work the one
dimensional standard chaotic logistic map 1D(SLM) is used for medical images cryptography
by acting as a random numbers generator that input to the chaos-based cryptography modified
algorithm steps depending on some determined number of iterations and specific algorithm for
each step to have the desired level of security. Many researchers try to design image
cryptography systems by using chaos, in [8] Zhang et al. proposed medical image protection
scheme based on Arnold cat map to shuffle the image pixels and use the logistic map to change

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IHSCICONF2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1003 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012036 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1003/1/012036

the pixels values by a chosen number of the rounds for encryption and have proven its efficiency
and security. In [9] Zhang et al. proposed a way to compress and encrypt the medical images
which the plain image is compressed and encrypted by chaos-based Bernoulli measurement
matrix, which is generated by the control of the Chebyshev map and perform a second level of
protection by encrypt the result by permutation-diffusion type chaotic cipher, in [10] Rakesh S
et al. present image encryption based on block scrambling using the chaotic Arnold cat map
and also scramble the whole image again using the same map then the image is encrypted using
a chaotic sequence generated using symmetric keys. In [11] Goce et al. present a block
encryption algorithm based on two well-known chaotic maps exponential and logistic and have
proven its efficiency against most of attacks rather than brute force attack.

2. Modified Method
This paper introduces the modified chaos-based cryptography algorithm by the use of the
traditional architecture by Fridrich [12] in order to protect the security of medical images. The
modification is presented through used the chaotic map rather than the two dimensional baker
map as used in Fridrich’s work; it is a symmetric block encryption. This architecture mainly
consist of two main stages: confusion and diffusion for medical image pixels where confusion
applied to changing pixels locations in the original medical image and diffusion step applied to
perform a transformation on pixels to change their values to remove correlation between pixels
[13], 1D chaotic map is used as a key generator that known as standard logistic map (SLM) and
its control parameter and initial value as a secret key for the cryptography process. Block
diagram of the medical image encryption process shows in 'figure 1'.

No Visit all Yes No Visit all Yes

image image
pixels? pixels?

Original Pixels Pixels Encrypted

Medical Confusion Diffusion Medical
image Process Process image

Key Key
1D standard logistic map

Initial value and parameters

Figure 1. Block diagram of medical image encryption process.

The input for the proposed encryption process is a gray-scale image that is get of image
database [14]. The medical image in this work can take different size of rows and columns. The
main steps of image encryption process shows in algorithm 1:

Algorithm 1. Medical image encryption process

Input: Encrypted medical image, initial value, parameters.
Output: Encrypted medical image.
Begin:

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IHSCICONF2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1003 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012036 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1003/1/012036

Step 1: Read the desired gray-scale medical image and save its pixels in to 2D array that
suits the cryptography process.
Step 2: Use the1D standard logistic map as random key generator and its initial condition
and its control parameter as image encryption secret key which given in equation
(1).
xn+1 = 𝜇xn (1 − xn ) (1)

Where µ is the system control parameter and the system is chaotic when 0< µ ≤4
and 𝑥0 ∈ [0, 1], this work use 𝑥0 =0.4 and µ =3.87 as the secret key value.
Step 3: Confuse the pixels position in the array by using the random values generated
from 1D standard logistic map and change the pixels positions depending on
modified confusion equation.
Step 4: Diffuse the pixels of the image depending on the random values generated from
the 1D Standard logistic map by performing some transformation on the image
pixels using modified equation to give them new values that produce ciphered
image with uniform histogram shape.

Step 5: Iterate step (3) and step (4) until all image pixels are visited.
End
After complete the image encryption process, the encrypted image can be send through
communication network or store in database with secure mode. At the other side, the decryption
process is applied on encrypted image by invers order of the encryption process. The main steps
of image decryption process shows in algorithm (2):

Algorithm 2. Medical image decryption process

Input: Encrypted medical image, initial value, parameters.
Output: Original medical image.
Begin:
Step 1: Read the gray-scale ciphered image and store it into 2D array of pixels.
Step 2: Enter the same key used in encryption into the key generator which it is the initial
value and the control parameter of the 1D standard logistic map, same values that
is used in the encryption process.
Step 3: The pixels of the image are diffused by perform inverse transformation and return
the value of each pixel to its original value.
Step 4: Confuse the pixels in inverse order and return pixels into their original positions
in the original image.
Step 5: Iterate step (3) and step (4) for all image pixels.
End

3. Experimental Results
In this section some results are described to show the performance and security of the
proposed algorithm. The experiments are performed on three MRI medical images with the
use of MATLAB 2016b programing language.

3.1. Histogram Analysis

In the following experiments the original, ciphered and recovered images and their histograms
are described in figure 2. It’s obvious that the histogram of the ciphered image is completely
different from the histogram of the original one and almost has a uniform distribution this makes

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IHSCICONF2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1003 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012036 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1003/1/012036

statistical attacks difficult because the ciphered image doesn’t provide any chance to employ
any kind of it.

Figure 2. Experimental results of the modified encryption method: from the first to the fifth
column are: original image, histogram of the original image, ciphered image, histogram of the
ciphered image, and the recovered images, respectively.

3.2. Entropy Analysis

It is important property founded in information theory by Shannon [6] to give idea about them,
the randomness and the unpredictability of an information source. Equation (2) used to calculate
the entropy value [15].
2𝑁 −1

𝐻(𝑚) = − ∑ 𝑃(𝑚𝑖 ) 𝑙𝑜𝑔2 𝑃(𝑚𝑖 ) (2)

𝐼=0

Where P(𝑚𝑖 ) is the probability of existence of the gray level value of pixel 𝑚𝑖 in the 𝑚 image
and the log is taken to represent them in term of bits; since the gray-scale image pixel values is
256 gray levels then its contain 8 bits so the ideal entropy value to the secure cryptosystem
must be 8 [16]. The entropies of the introduced medical images and their ciphered version are
presented in table 1. It is evident that the entropies of the ciphered images are extremely close
to the theoretical value of 8 which make the system able to resist the entropy attacks.

Table 1. Entropies of the original images and ciphered images.

Tested image Original image Ciphered image
MRI-brain 4.7571 7.9993
MRI -sinuses 5.1074 7.9993
MRI- neck 6.1344 7.9994

3.3. Time Analysis

The required time in image encryption process is very important aspect and depends on the
used encryption method complexity. This work uses Java v8 in medical image cryptography
algorithm implementation. Table 2, illustrate time analysis result of the previous three
medical images.

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IHSCICONF2017 IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1003 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012036 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1003/1/012036

Table 2. Time Analysis Results

Tested image Encryption process Decryption process
MRI-brain 0.282 sec 0.422 sec
MRI -sinuses 0.421 sec 0.337 sec
MRI- neck 0.671 sec 0.419 sec

4. Conclusions
In this paper medical image cryptography method is presented that based on chaos theory by
using one of the most simple and popular one dimensional chaotic map which named standard
logistic map. The results that have been shown proved that this method has an acceptable level
of security rather than it is robust against statistical attacks and entropy attack.

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