Texture maps and chaotic maps framework for secure medical image transmission

Telemedicine has evolved significantly for detection and diagnosis of diseases remotely, which means more frequent transmission of medical images over the network. The security of any medical image can be characterized as its integrity, confidentiality and authentication. It is these security vulnerabilities that limit the development of mobile healthcare applications, which intend to improve the efficiency of medical image communication. To address the vulnerabilities associated with medical images, we propose a texture edge map and multilevel chaotic map driven encryption framework for medical images. This technique utilizes texture maps generated by utilizing a bank of gabor filters along with multiple chaotic maps viz.: Sine, Cubic and Logistic maps for enhancing the key space, robustness and security of medical images over an insecure channel. The security, speed and reliability of the proposed technique for medical images are illustrated via experiments for key sensitivity, statistical and performance analysis. The proposed technique offers a large key space, pixel diffusion at an acceptable speed. Security analysis shows a high sensitive dependence of the encryption and decryption techniques to any subtle change in the secret key, the plain medical image and the encrypted image. Also, the proposed technique has a large enough key space to see off brute force attacks. Therefore, the proposed technique is a potential candidate for addressing security vulnerabilities of medical images over the communication networks.