Game of Life variations for image scrambling

The rapid development of multimedia and Internet technology has given more and more people the opportunity to exchange information via the Internet. There are many cases in which images containing trivial information are transmitted, but most of the time images will contain private data and therefore must be protected. Consequently, the security and confidentiality of digital data during storage and transmission have become an important and critical issue. Digital image scrambling is often used for image encryption and its aim is to transform a meaningful image into a meaningless one to enhance the ability to resist invalid attack and in turn improve security. In this paper, a new scheme is presented for digital gray image scrambling based on variants of the famous Game of Life (GoL) Cellular Automaton (CA). More specifically, two of those variations, namely asynchrony and enlarged neighborhood are taken into account. They are further enhanced to implement suitable GoL variations for efficient digital grey image scrambling while the presented simulation results prove that the modified variations can provide high security by scrambling pixel locations. It is shown that the resulting scrambling effect is influenced by the employed variation of GoL as well as by the dimensions of the image. Finally, in terms of Gray Difference Degree (GDD) the proposed digital image scrambling method, which is based on the aforementioned GoL variations, outperforms the existing techniques and produces an effective image encryption technique which enables excellent confidentiality. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.