An Image Encryption Scheme with the Associated Thumbnail

Image encryption can protect cloud image privacy. However, the usability of encrypted images has not received much attention. To this end, an image encryption scheme with an associated thumbnail is proposed, it generates both the encrypted image and the associated thumbnail, which can be stored in the cloud. The associated thumbnail is only partially encrypted, which has a small capacity, and maintains certain usability with less download and decryption time. Therefore, the users can download and decrypt the associated thumbnail instead of the encrypted image to meet general usage requirements, and most of the time there is no need to download the encrypted image from the cloud. Experiments show that this scheme balances image privacy protection and usability, and can bring convenience to the browsing and management of encrypted images in the cloud.