Image security tools for JPEG standards

Image privacy and security are receiving increasingly more attention these days though their impact is still underestimated. Every day billions of digital pictures are generated and distributed via social media, news sites and photo sharing applications. These images tend to carry quite some information that can be regarded to be private for the photographer and/or the pictured individuals. Furthermore, this information is not solely constrained to the visible information carried by the picture. For instance, the sensor noise that is embedded in the picture provides information related to the camera used to take the photo. Besides the picture essence also metadata is signaled in the image file containers, providing geospatial information, camera settings, photographer related information, etc. Hence, it is evident to understand that to protect the privacy of the persons that can be associated with the picture, the necessary security precautions need to be taken. Since many pictures are represented in JPEG image formats, it is evident that the JPEG committee is also investigating how it can integrate better support for privacy and security requirements in its suite of standards. In this presentation, an overview will be given of standardized solutions, where we will particularly focus on JPEG 2000 JPSEC framework, but will also discuss how the committee plans to further improve the support for these requirements in the context of the legacy JPEG standard.