Image encryption scheme based on balanced two-dimensional cellular automata (Q473833)

Summary: Cellular automata (CA) are simple models of computation which exhibit fascinatingly complex behavior. Due to the universality of CA model, it has been widely applied in traditional cryptography and image processing. The aim of this paper is to present a new image encryption scheme based on balanced two-dimensional cellular automata. In this scheme, a random image with the same size of the plain image to be encrypted is first generated by a pseudo-random number generator with a seed. Then, the random image is evoluted alternately with two balanced two-dimensional CA rules. At last, the cipher image is obtained by operating bitwise XOR on the final evolution image and the plain image. This proposed scheme possesses some advantages such as very large key space, high randomness, complex cryptographic structure, and pretty fast encryption/decryption speed. Simulation results obtained from some classical images at the USC-SIPI database demonstrate the strong performance of the proposed image encryption scheme.