International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-019-04258-6

Quantum Selective Encryption for Medical Images

Shahrokh Heidari1 · Mosayeb Naseri2 · Koji Nagata3

Received: 5 May 2019 / Accepted: 19 August 2019 / Published online: 7 October 2019
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
To trade security off for computational complexity, Selective Encryption (SE) in Image Pro-
cessing denotes an approach which is capable of encrypting an image partially. In other
words, it is aimed at turning the visually most important parts of images into meaningless
ones, ignoring unimportant regions to have a computationally-efficient technique. Based
on BRQI images, in this paper, a novel quantum selective encryption method for medical
images is investigated. ROI (Region of Interest) tends to be the most vital part of medical
images, which should be protected during the transmissions. The proposed method encrypts
this region effectively by manipulating the bitplanes of the images according to a key. Exper-
imental results encompassing correlation of adjacent pixels, histogram analysis and entropy
rate analyzed in MATLAB environment demonstrate a good performance. Furthermore,
regarding a BRQI image of 2n pixels, the time complexity is not more than O(m), where m
is length of the key sequence. On no condition does it depend on size of images, bringing
about being far more time-efficient compared to its classical counterpart and even earlier
studied works found in the literature (full-encryption ones). To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first method to introduce a quantum selective image encryption method.

Keywords Quantum information · Quantum image processing · QImP · BRQI ·

Quantum selective encryption · QSE

1 Introduction

Undoubtedly, image security is an integral part of communication technology nowadays,

playing a very important role in having a secure transmission. Being used significantly

 Mosayeb Naseri
[email protected]

Shahrokh Heidari
[email protected]

1 Young Researchers and Elite Club, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University,
Kermanshah, Iran
2 Department of Physics, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran
3 Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon,
305-701, Korea

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3909

with the aim of having such transmissions, image encryption is defined as encoding an
image with the help of encryption algorithms, turning the original image into a meaningless
image which cannot be recognized by people, but those having the required key as well
as knowing the decryption algorithm. In majority of cases, the primary goal is having an
invulnerable method, a full-encryption one, so that unauthorized individuals would not be
able to distinguish the original image.
Not every application, however, needs these level of protection due to the fact that full-
encryption methods usually take too much time. Take for example medical image security
or even satellite one. In these kind of images, always there is an important area named ROI
(Region of Interest) which is necessary to be encrypted during transmission. So, when time
is our priority, it is better to protect just ROI instead of the entire image. Fundamentally,
Selective Encryption (SE) denotes a technique which is able to encrypt an image partially
with the aim of trading off the security for computational complexity. In other words, some
applications need to be performed in an acceptable time while the security of the system
should be kept satisfying. Hence, SE tends to protect the visually most important parts of an
image in order to reduce the unnecessary computations. In spite of the fact that security of
such approaches is lower than that of full-encryption techniques, to have a computationally-
efficient technique, it is sometimes desirable to encrypt pixels of images partly, meaning
that the total concentration should be on encrypting the ROI regions [1, 2].
The importance of SE in a time-efficient transmission can be perceived when a dis-
tributed database infrastructure is taken into account, especially one related to medical data.
For instance, in health systems and hospitals, most of doctors tend to access to each other’s
patient information. A medical distributed database can be used here with the aim of avoid-
ing waste of resources so that the doctors would be able to request all prior medical data
of each patient. Moreover, there is no doubt that the future of health care will be formed
by teleradiology and technologies such as telemedicine [1]. Thus, it is of crucial impor-
tance to prepare a confidential transmission of patients’ medical information, most notably
when these data should be sent from a database through a network of any kind. Taken from
another point of view, such distributed systems often face with huge number of requests
by doctors, which should be processed effectively in an acceptable time. Considering these
two views, we have to optimize both security and time complexity simultaneously. Conse-
quently, SE seems to be a best choice here due to satisfying the both criteria. An example
of SE is provided in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 A Selective-Encryption example for medical images (resulted in our simulation)

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3910 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

Having discussed SE as an efficient method in medical-image transmission, now we

discuss a kind of computations named Quantum Computing as our investigated method is
based on it. Obviously, one of the techniques which can decrease hugely computational
complexity is using quantum computation. The advent of quantum information theory
brings about that researchers all around the world have investigated different approaches
to use quantum computation in many applications so as to reduce computational complex-
ity. Image Processing has been one of these applications, making QImP (Quantum Image
Processing) as an interesting field of study. QImP refers to techniques which utilize quan-
tum properties of particles (such as superposition and entanglement) to store, manipulate
and recover digital images, which means that to have a better performance and greater effi-
ciency, digital images are turned into quantum states [3]. After introducing QImP, a variety
of quantum representations for digital images have been proposed [5–13], leading most of
areas related to Image Processing to be engaged with quantum computations; for example
quantum image security including Watermarking [14–22], Steganography [23–29], Encryp-
tion [30–39] and Scrambling [40–44], and also the other preprocessing methods which has
been studied in QImP [45–50].
Regarding the earlier studied works, some of them can be briefly discussed as follows. In
2016, a quantum image encryption algorithm based on quantum image XOR operations was
introduced by Gong et al. [33], which proved it has lower computational complexity than its
classical counterparts. In this approach Chen hyper-chaotic system is used to generate the
hyper-chaotic sequences to control the Control-Not operations. Recently, El-Latif et al. sug-
gested a new quantum image full-encryption method for medical images [36], in which the
gray code and chaotic map are utilized. To be more precise, The former is used to scram-
ble the original image as the first step, and the latter is used to encrypt the scrambled image
based on quantum XOR operations and a key image. Furthermore, very recently, Zhou et al.
investigated a new quantum image encryption for color images which is based on bit planes
[37]. In their provided technique the quantum cross-exchange operation and a 5D hyper-
chaotic system are exploited in order to encrypt the colored image. In this contribution, a
confidential and time-efficient quantum image encryption based on Selective Encryption
technique is suggested. As a matter of fact, instead of encrypting the entire medical image,
in the proposed method, a particular area of the image is taken into account. This area is
named ROI (Region of Interest), the most important part of the medical images. To encrypt
such an area partially, some Swap and CNOT gates according to a key sequence are applied
to bitplanes of medical images which are modelled by BRQI (Bitplane Representation of
Quantum Images) [13].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. A brief required explanation about how a
digital image can be illustrated by BRQI is given in Section 2. Next, our proposed method
with the aim of performing quantum selective encryption for medical images is investigated
in Section 3. The simulation-based experiments and analysis are provided in Section 4. Then
Section 5 is dedicated to comparing our proposed method with related studied works found
in the literature. Finally, the conclusion is discussed in Section 6.

2 Bitplane Representation of Quantum Images (BRQI)

Very recently, Li et al. proposed a new quantum representation based on bitplanes [13], in
which n + 4 qubits are used to store a gray-scale image of 2n pixels. Being able to store
colored RGB images too, in this section, BRQI is taken into account only for gray-scale

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3911

image owning to the fact our investigated approach will be based on these kind of images.
The following displays how a gray-scale image can be encoded according to BRQI.
Generally, a gray tone has 8 binary bits; consequently, a gray-scale image can be decom-
posed into 8 binary images separately, which are named 8 bitplanes. An example of these
bitplanes can be shown in Fig. 2.
Suppose that |g is a 2n−k × 2k gray-scale image with gray range 8 (number of colors
would be 256, between 0 to 255, as 28 = 256). BRQI for a gray-scale image of 2n pixels is
formulated as below according to Ref. [13].
3 −1] [2n−k −1] [2k −1]
[2  
1
|Ψ 8  = √ |g(x, y)|x|y|l, (1)
2n+3 l=0 x=0 y=0

where |x = |in−1 ...ik  and |y = |ik−1 ...i0  are the X-axis and Y-axis of the image in turn,
and i0 , ...ik , ...in−1 ∈ [0, 1]. Furthermore, g(x, y) denotes bit-color of l th bitplane on the
coordinate (x, y), and l shows number of bitplanes which is 8 here. A clear illustration as a
simple example is shown in Fig. 2. Having 8 pixels, the given gray image is 4 × 2, meaning
that n = 3 due to ”8 = 2n ”, and k equals 1 here. Although Ref. [13] suggests that each
bitplane should be considered individually like a binary image, in Fig. 2, to have a perfectly

Fig. 2 A 256 × 256 gray-scale image and its bitplanes

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3912 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

Fig. 3 A simple gray-scale image and its BRQI representation. Note that the provided representation is just
for the first and last pixels

understandable model, each pixel is depicted based on BRQI. Note that when two or more
quantum states are supervised, the order in which they occur is unimportant [4]. Changing
only the order of the states in the illustration, there is no difference between the model
shown in Fig. 3 and the proposed model in Ref. [13].
Regrading number of the required qubits in BRQI, which is n + 4 for an image of 2n
pixels [13], it is explicit that this quantum representation needs significantly less qubits
compared to the other quantum-image models such as NEQR [9] and NCQI [12]. Accord-
ingly, having less computational complexity, in our introduced technique, BRQI is assigned
to be used effectively as a way of encoding medical images into quantum states, so that we
would be able to reduce the unnecessary computations as much as possible, introducing a
computationally-efficient technique for SE.

3 Quantum Selective Encryption-Decryption for Medical Images

Based on BRQI images, our investigated method is discussed here. To begin with, it is better
to have a wider perspective on the introduced technique. Accordingly, a bare outline of the
procedure has been prepared in Fig. 4, depicting how our selective encryption-decryption
method is conducted.
Typically, ROI (Region of Interest) of medical images can refer to any objects in them,
from the tiniest objects to the biggest ones, and it significantly depends on the kind of the
processes. Owning to the fact our prime goal is to have a selective encryption method, the
biggest object of the medical images (the entire ROI) is taken into account in the rest of

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3913

Fig. 4 The outline of the quantum selective encryption-decryption method

the paper. Furthermore, it is obvious that the most important parts of the medical image are
shown in light colors, and dark pixels often show the background. This dark region is named
Non-ROI, meaning that such an area of the image is not important. The follows show how
just ROI of medical images can be encrypted in order to have a time-efficient approach,
which is really useful in some applications such as the discussed distributed database of
health systems, when time is our priority and encrypting Non-ROI regions can be ignored.

Theorem 1 Generally, changing the order of bitplanes in medical images does not have a
significant impact on the background colors, and it brings about noticeable modifications
on light colors which shows the ROI region.

Proof Take for example a background pixel with 00000000 bits. The order of bitplanes
in this pixel is not important and turning it into another one remains them unchanged.
Consequently, only light colors (the ROI region) are changed when the bitplanes are
modified.

What stands out from Theorem 1 is that encrypting only bitplanes of medical images
turns its ROI region into a meaningless ROI one, meaning that when time is our priority,
the encryption of Non-ROI regions can be ignored, and it is needless to encrypt the entire
image. Regardless the encrypted ROI region, obviously, unauthorized individuals are not
capable of extracting any information from Non-ROI areas, but mere black pixels. Hence,
the necessity of changing positions of pixels does not exist any more, meaning that we can
reduce number of operations considerably.

3.1 Explanation of the Algorithm

To ensure that unauthorized individuals are not able to reach ROI regions of encrypted
images as well as enhancing security of the approach as much as possible, a key sequence

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3914 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

should be defined, which is necessary to be shared to both sender and receiver. This key is
a qubit sequence that can be formulated as below.
|K = |K1 K2 K3 ...Km−1 Km , Ki ∈ 0, 1, i = 1, 2, 3, ..., m (2)
Suppose that our medical image encoded based on BRQI image is a × gray-scale
2n−k 2k
image with color range q = 8. Equation (1) shows its representation. Our quantum selective
encryption algorithm for gray-scale medical images can be given as follows.
For i=1 to m
– If Ki = 1 then
1. If l3 = 0 then N OT (g(x, y))
2. Swap(l1 , l2 )
3. Swap(l2 , l3 )
4. If l3 = 0 then N OT (l1 )
5. N OT (l1 ), N OT (l2 ), N OT (l3 )
– If Ki = 0 then
1. If l3 = 1 then N OT (g(x, y))
2. Swap3 (l1 , l3 )
3. Swap(l2 , l3 )
4. If l3 = 0 then N OT (l2 )
5. N OT (l1 ), N OT (l2 ), N OT (l3 )
In the above explanation, N OT inverts its target, changing 0 to 1 and 1 to 0. Regarding
Swap operation, it exchanges its inputs, and Swap3 is a Swap gate engaging with three
qubits (refer to Fig. 8 for more details) . As discussed in Section 2, |l3 l2 l1  in the BRQI
model shows the bitplane number. So, what can be understood from the algorithm is that
the main goal is changing order of bitplanes in order to produce a meaningless output.
Obviously, the algorithm is divided into two sections according to Ki value. Suppose that
Ki equals 1. Due to the fact that l3 l2 l1 can accommodates 8 values, it would be one of these
values at the time of measuring: 000,001,010,011,100,101,110 and 111, depicting bitplanes
0 to 7. Part-1 tells us ”If l3 = 0 then N OT (g(x, y))”, which means when l3 l2 l1 equals
000,001,010 or 011, Not gate should be implemented. Consequently, when Ki = 1, Part-1
brings about that the bit color (g(x,y)) of bitplanes 0,1,2 and 3 should be inverted. Part-2 and
Part-3 are executed so as to change the order of bitplanes. In Part-4, in the case of l3 = 0, l1
should be inverted. Accordingly, the possible states would be 000,001,010 or 011, and they
would be changed to 001,001,011 and 010 in turn. Finally, Part-5 causes inverting all qubits

Fig. 5 All possible states of l3 l2 l1 when Ki = 1 in the investigated algorithm

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3915

of |l. The entire possible states in the encryption algorithm when Ki = 1, from Part-2 to
Part-5 is given in Fig. 5. Note that the explanation of the encryption algorithm when Ki = 0
is similar to the earlier discussion.
To apply the introduced quantum selective-encryption to a BRQI image encoding a med-
ical image, a quantum circuit is required. Figure 6 illustrates the designed quantum circuit,
displaying how a ROI of a medical image can be encrypted according to a key sequence.
Suppose that our medical image, which is based on BRQI representation, is as follow.
Note that size of the image is 2n−k × 2k with gray range 8.
3 −1] [2n−k −1] [2k −1]
[2  
1
|Ψ  = √
8
|g(x, y)|x|y|l, (3)
2n+3 l=0 x=0 y=0

The derivation of the quantum selective-encryption can be written by the transformation

operation U i applied to key qubit Ki and the image |Ψ 8 .
   
U i = C 1 Uai |Ψ 8  + C 0 Ubi |Ψ 8  (4)
   
U i = |11| ⊗ Uai |Ψ 8  + |00| ⊗ Ubi |Ψ 8 
The above equation shows that by applying U i to Ki , when Ki = 1, Uai is applied to the
image |Ψ 8 ; and when Ki = 0, the image |Ψ 8  is modified by Ubi . The follows describe
how operations Ua and Ub are able to implement our proposed technique.
With respect to the first box of the quantum circuit shown in Fig. 6, it can be implemented
by Uai as follows. Note that in BRQI representation, |g(x, y), |x|y and |l require 1, n
and 3 qubits respectively.
Uai = U1 U2 U3 U4 U5 (5)
⎧
⎨ 1 U =, |00| ⊗ U1a + |11| ⊗ U1b ;
U1a =, X ⊗ I ⊗n+2 ;
⎩
U1b =, I ⊗n+4 .

U2 =, I ⊗n+1 ⊗ Swap ⊗ I ;
U3 =, I ⊗n+2 ⊗ Swap.
U2 and U3 cause the blow modification:
|l3 l2 l1 → |l3 l1 l2  when Ki = 1,
|l3 l2 l1 → |l2 l3 l1  when Ki = 1.

Fig. 6 The required circuit for implementing our quantum selective encryption

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3916 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

⎧
⎨ U4 =, |00| ⊗ U4a + |11| ⊗ U4b ;
U4a =, I ⊗n+1 ⊗ X ⊗ I ;
⎩
U4b =, I ⊗n+4 .
And finally, U5 should be defined as below:
U5 = I ⊗n+1 ⊗ X ⊗3 .
It is worth mentioning that by applying Uai to the medical image |Ψ 8  when Ki = 1, the
first box of the provided quantum circuit shown in Fig. 6 is addressed. Likewise, Ubi can be
defined as follow.
Ubi = U6 U7 U8 U9 U10 (6)
⎧
⎨ 6U =, |11| ⊗ U6a + |00| ⊗ U6b ;
U6a =, X ⊗ I ⊗n+2 ;
⎩
U6b =, I ⊗n+4 .

U7 =, I ⊗n+1 ⊗ Swap3 ;
U8 =, I ⊗n+2 ⊗ Swap.
The effects of U7 and U8 can be written as below:
|l3 l2 l1  → |l1 l2 l3  when Ki = 0,
|l l l1 → |l2 l3 l1  when Ki = 0.
⎧ 32
⎨ U9 =, |00| ⊗ U9a + |11| ⊗ U9b ;
U9a =, I ⊗n+2 ⊗ X;
⎩
U9b =, I ⊗n+4 .
Finally, U10 should implement 3 N ot gates on |l3 l2 l1 , which can be shown as follow.
U10 = I ⊗n+1 ⊗ X ⊗3 .
By applying Ubi to the medical image |Ψ 8  when |Ki  = 0, the required operations for the
second box of the proposed quantum circuit depicted in Fig. 6 is prepared. Consequently,
U i according to the value of Ki can encrypt the medical image |Ψ 8  partially, for just one
time. Due to the fact that our key sequence should be used for enhancing security, we need
to apply Ui to |Ψ 8  m times, where m is length of |K. Considering the qubit-sequence |K,
the entire quantum operations for the investigated approach can be formulated as follow.
m
ΩE = U i (|Ki |Ψ 8 ) (7)
i=1
Note that the decryption process is done by inverting the designed quantum circuit. Con-
sidering the encrypted image as |Ψ̄ 8 , we need to take |K and ΩD into account as
below.
|K̄ = |Km Km−1 ...K2 K1 , Ki ∈ 0, 1, i = m, m − 1, ..., 2, 1. (8)
m
ΩD = Ū i (|K̄i |Ψ 8 ), (9)
i=1
   
Ū i = |11| ⊗ Ūai |Ψ 8  + |00| ⊗ Ūbi |Ψ 8  ,
Ūai = U5 U4 U3 U2 U1 ,
Ūbi = U10 U9 U8 U7 U6 .
The block circuit of the introduced quantum selective encryption-decryption method, which
is investigated for medical images, is provided in Fig. 7.

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3917

Fig. 7 Block circuit of the selective encryption-decryption method

3.1.1 Time Complexity

Generally, to calculate the network complexity, a rudimentary quantum gate is taken into
account as a basic gate. Owning to the fact that most of our quantum gates shown in Fig. 6
can be implemented by Toffoli gates, we will assess the circuit complexity of our proposed
method based on these kind of gates. First of all, it is of vital importance to show our
designed quantum circuit based on Toffoli gates. Figure 8 has been prepared to demonstrate
the necessary changes, showing how a Swap gate can be turned into three CNOT gates, and
also how a zero-condition CNOT gate can be implemented by a one-condition CNOT gate.

Fig. 8 The implementation of Swap, Swap3 and C 0 − gate by using just C 1 − gate

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3918 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

Having the required transformations, our provided quantum circuit illustrated in Fig. 6
can be redesigned based on Toffoli gates, which is given in Fig. 9.
Considering U i in (4) as well as the given illustration in Fig. 9, we can now easily assess
our network complexity based on Toffoli gates.

Lemma 1 The time complexity of U i is O(1).

Proof U i includes two sub-operations , which can be implemented by using CNOT gates
and Toffoli gates according to Fig. 9. What stands out from the circuit is that U i needs 16
Toffoli gates, 6 C 1 N OT gates and 8 N ot gates. Consequently, time complexity of U i is not
more than O(1).

Theorem 2 The time complexity of the proposed method is O(m), where m is length of the
key.

Proof For enhancing security, a key qubit-sequence named |K has been used. Length of
this key is m, and according to our introduced method, it is of crucial importance to apply
the algorithm to the medical image m times. Lemma 1 proved that time complexity of U i
is not more than O(1); due to the fact that U i should be applied m times, our investigated
method has a time complexity of O(m).

It is worth mentioning that for encrypting a medical gray-scale image, similar to what
we have proposed, with classical algorithm, the time complexity would be O(m2n ) for 2n
pixels of an image when length of the key is m. Therefore, the studied quantum selec-
tive image encryption algorithm takes advantage over its classical counterparts in terms of
computational complexity. Furthermore, the most interesting superiority of the investigated
technique is that it does not depend on the size of images, meaning that it tends to encrypt a
small-size medical image partially in a determined time just like encrypting a big-size one.
This is due to the fact that this method is not aimed at position qubits.

4 Simulation and Analysis

To evaluate the suggested quantum selective encryption-decryption method, this section is

dedicated to simulating it, analyzing some important criteria. Not having an accessible and
affordable physical quantum hardware to examine our proposed technique in a real situation,
simulation procedure has been conducted by a classical computer Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU
X5650 @2.67GHz, 8.00 GB Ram equipped with the MATLAB R2015a environment. To

Fig. 9 The quantum circuit of the proposed selective encryption-decryption method based on Toffoli gates

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3919

begin with, Fig. 10 displays some medical images with different sizes, demonstrating the
effects of applying our algorithm to them with the aim of selective image encryption.
Encrypting just the ROI region of medical images, we need to consider this section for
analyzing, which means the black background has not been our target to implement the
encryption procedure. Consequently, in the followings, some typical gray-scale images and
their corresponding encrypted ones shown in Fig. 11 are taken into account to analyze our
method. Note that the encrypted gray-scale images depicted in Fig. 11 are resulted by imple-
menting the suggested method, and the reason why they are not selective is obvious, which

Fig. 10 Some medical images before and after implementing our proposed selective encryption procedure

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3920 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

Fig. 11 Some medical gray-scale images before and after implementing our proposed selective encryption
procedure

is due to the fact that this technique has been introduced merely for medical images having
ROI and Non-ROI regions.

4.1 Correlation of Adjacent Pixels

The Brightness of a pixel (known as pixel-value) in all images is significantly close to that
of its diagonally, vertically and horizontally adjacent pixels, meaning that the pertained cor-
relations are notably close to 1. Thus, when an image is encrypted, undoubtedly, the closer
correlation to 0, the more secure encryption procedure, meaning that regarding their val-
ues, adjacent pixels should not be in a similar range in an encrypted image. Equation (10)
shows the correlations between each pair of two adjacent pixels in an image [35]. Consid-
ering M as the total number of adjacent pixel pairs in each direction; ki and li as the values
of adjacent pixels, the correlation of adjacent pixels corrkl can be given as below.
  
M M M
i=1 ki − m li − M
1 1
j =1 kj j =1 lj
corrkl =     (10)
2 2
M M M M
i=1 ki − 1
M j =1 kj i=1 li − 1
M j =1 lj

The calculated correlation coefficients of gray-scale images shown in Fig. 10 are given in
Table 1 and Fig. 12, which provide the correlations for two pixel pairs of the original and
Table 1 The correlations of adjacent pixels (Horizontal, Vertical and Diagonal directions)

Image name Horizontal Vertical Diagonal

Image -1 (original) 0.94567 0.97109 0.92113

Image -1 (encrypted) 0.01918 0.013607 0.015805
Image -2 (original) 0.91648 09065 0.8568
Image -2 (encrypted) 0.014981 0.015379 0.0057881
Image -3 (original) 0.88242 0.91262 0.81841
Image -3 (encrypted) 0.011882 0.010716 0.011912
Image -4 (original) 0.95262 0.95818 0.92021
Image -4 (encrypted) 0.017235 0.014486 0.019844

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3921

Fig. 12 The illustration of calculated correlations for ”Image-4”. The first column is related to the original
image, and the second one belongs to the encrypted image

encrypted images in three directions including vertical, diagonal and horizontal ones. Note
that Fig. 12 has been prepared for “Image-4”. As can be seen from Table 1 and Fig. 12,
the final calculations for the correlation satisfy the zero-correlation requirement as they are
close to zero.

4.2 Shannon Entropy Analysis

Measuring the distribution of image pixels is known as entropy analysis [35]. Equation (11)
indicates how entropy of an image can be calculated.
L −1
2
Entropy = − p(ui )log2 (p(ui )) , (11)
i=1

where p(ui ) denotes the probability ui . Taking account of the fact that gray-scale images
typically are based on gray range 28 causing 256 colors, the ideal value for the entropy of
Table 2 The entropy analysis
Image name Original image Encrypted image

Image -1 7.3495 7.9545

Image -2 7.0298 7.9577
Image -3 7.2365 7.9577
Image -4 7.5065 7.9503

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3922 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

Fig. 13 Histogram analysis of the proposed method. The first column is related to the original image, and
the second one belongs to the encrypted image

Table 3 Time-complexity comparison among our proposed method, Ref. [32] and Ref. [33]

Method name Time complexity Independent of image size

Ref. [32] O(n2 ) No

Ref. [33] O(n) No
Proposed method O(m), m  n Yes
Its corresponding classical approach O(m22n ) No

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International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926 3923

encrypted images tends to be close to 8 − bit so that it would be capable of proving the
efficiency of the encryption algorithm. The provided Table 2 gives the entropy analyses for
our proposed technique. Clearly, our method is secure against entropy attacks.

4.3 Histogram Analysis

An image histogram diagram illustrates frequency of intensity values occurring in an image.

Generally, image histograms in encryption analyses are performed in order to assess perfor-
mance of the encryption procedure. Having uniform histogram insures that the algorithm
is capable of offering strong resistance against the statistical cryptanalysis. Our histogram
analysis provided in Fig. 13 shows an acceptable uniformity.

5 Comparison

With respect to aforementioned discussion in Section 1, one cannot deny that Selective
Encryption (SE) procedures are not able to be conducted more efficient than Full Encryption
ones when we look the analyzed criteria such as correlation of adjacent pixels, entropy and
histogram analyses on account of the fact that the former is aimed at encrypting a particular
region; the latter, however, is done for the whole image, meaning that number of encrypted
pixels would be far more. Consequently, regarding the discussed criteria, our investigated
method compared to the related works found in the literature [32, 33] would not be better
as our main purpose is to have significantly better time complexity, most notably when we
have a huge number of requests in a distributed medical database.
The mentioned superiority of the proposed algorithm can be conceived easily by taking
time complexity of Ref. [32] and Ref. [33] into account as compared with our method in
Table 3.
Considerably less than n, m is length of the key, and as can be perceived from Table 3,
it is clear that when time is our priority, our proposed quantum image selective encryption
method is capable of performing far better for medical images, as opposed to Ref. [32] and
Ref. [33] requiring too much time, which do not tend to be efficient as far as number of
requests in the discussed medical database and size of images are matter.

6 Conclusion

Unarguably, recently, Quantum Image Processing (QImP) has been studied tremendously
by researchers all around the world, despite of being in its infancy, and interestingly, medical
image processing techniques also have been become involved in quantum computation.
As regards health systems, nowadays medical databases and its related transmissions need
to be protected effectively. In majority of cases, number of requests from doctors to the
database systems in order to access their patients’ medical images is far numerous, and Full
Encryption methods are not always our optimal choices due to taking too much time. In this
situation, Selective Encryption tends to be a brilliant idea, which is defined as encrypting the
visually most important part of images to trade security off for computational complexity.
In this contribution, a novel quantum selective encryption for medical images has been
investigated. Based on BRQI representation, the proposed method is aimed at encrypting
a special region of medical images named ROI (Region of Interest) by manipulating the

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3924 International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2019) 58:3908–3926

order of its bitplanes according to a key sequence. Our simulation conducted in MAT-
LAB environment has shown a good performance regarding some important criteria such
as correlation of adjacent pixels, histogram analysis and, last but not least, entropy rate. In
addition, the time complexity of the introduce method for a BRQI of 2n pixels with key-
length m has been calculated, having a massive advantage over its classical counterpart,
which is O(m) as opposed to that of classical one (m2n ). What stands out from the time
complexity is that size of medical images cannot affect our approach, which can be taken
into account as a potential benefit. Finally, we have compared our method with two earlier
works regarding their time complexities. The results have shown that when time is the first
priority, our proposed method outperform these investigated methods.

Acknowledgements Acknowledging support of Kermanshah Branch, Young Researchers and Elite club,
IRAN, the first author would like to thank Besharat Rabiei for her interest in this work.

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