Exploiting compressed sensing (CS) and RNA operations for effective content-adaptive image compression and encryption

Compressed sensing (CS) has been applied for image compression and encryption, for it may compress and encrypt images simultaneously. However, some CS-based image encryption algorithms still suffer from low security and compression performance. To solve these problems, a content-adaptive compression-encryption based on CS and RiboNucleic Acid (RNA) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the 4D laser chaos system was used to construct a measurement matrix for image compression. Secondly, an Improved Fractal Sorting Matrix (IFSM) and its iterative approach are introduced based on the Fractal Sorting Matrix (FSM) for permutation. It has the same characteristics as FSM, but with a greater permutation effect and a broader range of applications. Finally, an adaptive RNA diffusion is designed based on the unique codon of RNA, which includes codon substitution and calculation operations. This adaptive operations make the algorithm more difficult to crack. Additionally, chaotic sequences driven by the hash value of plain image are utilized in the whole encryption, which enhances the correlation between the algorithm and plain image and improves the ability to resist known-plaintext and chosen-plaintext attacks. Experimental results and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme has excellent security and compression property.