Nonlinear Dyn (2022) 110:2831–2847

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-022-07736-5 (0123456789().,-volV)
( 01234567
89().,-volV)

ORIGINAL PAPER

Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly

designed chaotic map and P-tensor product compressive
sensing in WBANs
Xianwei Rong . Donghua Jiang . Mingwen Zheng . Xiaoyan Yu .
Xingyuan Wang

Received: 27 May 2022 / Accepted: 19 July 2022 / Published online: 11 August 2022
Ó The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022

Abstract Aiming at the problem that the data
encryption schemes applied in wireless body area
networks (WBANs) lack crypticity, in this paper, a
meaningful data encryption scheme by combining
P-tensor product compressive sensing model, newly
designed chaotic map and data embedding technology
is presented. First, a novel one-dimensional discrete
chaotic map is constructed through the ‘‘stretching-
and-squeezing’’ mechanism to produce the key-con-
trolled chaotic measurement matrix. Then, the gener-
ated measurement matrix and the 2-D Arnold
scrambling are, respectively, utilized to encrypt and
X. Rong (&)  X. Yu
Physics and Electronic Engineering School, Harbin
Normal University, Harbin 150025, China
e-mail: rongxianwei@hrbnu.edu.cn
X. Yu
e-mail: yuxiaoyan@hrbnu.edu.cn
compress the plaintext wavelet packet coefficients,
and the non-semantic secret image is obtained via the
bidirectional Modulo-Plus diffusion operation under
the control of secret code streams. Eventually, the
matrix coding-based embedding approach is adopted
to hide the secret data in a publicly available non-
secret transmission medium to eliminate its statistical
pseudo-random properties and obtain the meaningful
ciphertext data. The theoretical analysis and experi-
mental results indicate that under the premise of
ensuring sufficient security, the performance of the
proposed encryption scheme in terms of visual secu-
rity, compressibility and encryption efficiency has
been greatly improved, compared with existing
schemes.
Keywords Symmetric cryptographic scheme 
Chaotic map  P-tensor product  Compressive
sensing  WBANs

D. Jiang (&)
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-
Sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
e-mail: jiangdh8@mail2.sysu.edu.cn 1 Introduction

M. Zheng
With the rapid development of sensor technology,
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Shandong
University of Technology, Zibo 255012, China low-power integrated circuit technology and wireless
e-mail: sdlgzmw@sdut.edu.cn communication technology, the wireless body area
networks (WBANs) have become the new technology
X. Wang
to monitor the human physiological parameters,
School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian
Maritime University, Dalian 116026, China providing new solution for information medical treat-
e-mail: wangxy@dlut.edu.cn ment. And it is composed of many small intelligent

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2832
biomedical sensors and controllers [1]. In WBANs, the
sensors can be implanted in patient’s skin or worn on
the human body to collect various life data, such as the
electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, blood pres-
sure, blood sugar and heart rate, to monitor the health
of the patient. As illustrated in Fig. 1, through the
short-/long-range wireless communication technolo-
gies, such as WIFI, BLUETOOTH, ZIGBEE, 4G and
5G, all the data collected by the sensor nodes are
gathered into the body sensor coordinator (like the
smart bracelet or phone). After that, these sensor data
are sent to the hospital monitoring station via the
Internet. Finally, the medical experts can acquire the
real-time data and information related to the patient’s
health, so as to provide timely and appropriate
treatment to the patient.
Since the body area network system is connected to
the publicly open Internet, human perception data will
be subject to various potential security risks, such as
privacy data leakage, malicious tampering, and unau-
thorized access. Additionally, for the traditional
encryption method, such as AES and DES, due to its
extremely high complexity [2, 3], it is not suitable for
application in the sensor nodes with the restricted
computing power and storage resources. At present, in
order to ensure the transmission security of sensor data
in WBANs, many effective solutions have been
proposed [4, 5]. For instances, Sahai et al. proposed
a fuzzy identity-based encryption scheme [6]. And in
their scheme, biometric-based attributes rather than
arbitrary strings are utilized as the identity informa-
tion, avoiding the need for online public key infras-
tructure. In Ref. [7], Baek et al. extended the stateful
Management
Application provider
Personal server
Internet
Sensor node
Fig. 1 System model of WBANs
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X. Rong et al.
public key encryption scheme and constructed a new
lightweight asymmetric encryption primitive based on
the proposed scheme. Then, to solve the existing
problems of the adaptive processing and energy
limitation, a flexible and secure data transmission
system is proposed by Li et al. in Ref. [8] by
introducing the semi-tensor product compressive
sensing (STP-CS) into the WBANs. Furthermore,
Raja et al. presented an encryption methodology for
the secure transmission of sensor data to the hospital
data center [9]. And on this basis, an improved ad hoc
on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocol is
designed to improve the reliability of the data
transmission system.
Although the existing data transmission system can
ensure the security of sensor data to a certain extent,
there are still some drawbacks in WBANs. One of
them is that the ciphertext data transmitted in the
public channel do not possess crypticity. Taking the
digital image data as an example, the encrypted image
has pseudo-random characteristics. That is, its his-
togram is flat, the correlation coefficient between local
pixels within it is approximately equal to zero, and it
does not have semantics visually. Especially with the
continuous improvement of deep learning at the
moment, the data-driven neural network model can
intelligently perform encryption analysis, malicious
attack and illegal interception on the ciphertext data
without semantic features [10, 11]. Secondly, consid-
ering that the storage resources, computing power and
energy in the sensor nodes are restricted, the data
collected by sensor nodes are redundant; thus, it is
Private key
Registration
Data center
Access point
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed
indispensable to introduce compression model in
WBANs.
To solve the existing problems discussed above, a
novel meaningful data encryption scheme by combin-
ing the newly designed lightweight chaotic map and
P-tensor product compressive sensing (PTP-CS)
model is presented in this paper. It is worth mentioning
that the meaningful image encryption is a new branch
of image protection field, which refers to a novel
security model of encryption first and then steganog-
raphy [10]. The innovations of this paper are summa-
rized as follows:
(1) A lightweight discrete chaotic map with simple
structure and stable chaotic performance is designed to
generate the more random secret code streams in the
encryption phase.
(2) In spatial domain, a matrix coding-based
embedding approach, called one-pixel-two-bit
(OPTB) embedding, is developed to losslessly hide
the non-semantic secret data into the non-secret-
involved transmission medium.
(3) The P-tensor product compressive sensing
model is introduced into WBANs to adapt the
dimensional diversity of data. And then by combining
it with chaotic map and information hiding technol-
ogy, a novel visually meaningful data encryption
scheme is presented.
The remaining sections of this paper are organized
as the follows: Section 2 gives the prior knowledge of
the PTP-CS model, as well as the mathematical
definition of newly designed low-dimensional discrete
chaotic map and its performance analysis. Then, the
technical details of the data encryption scheme and its
corresponding decryption scheme proposed in this
paper are illustrated in Sect. 3. Furthermore, Sect. 4
presents the simulation results and analysis of the
proposed scheme, as well as the results of comparative
experiments with other progressive encryption
schemes. And the last section briefly summarizes our
work.
2 Fundamental knowledge
In this section, the p-tensor product compressive
sensing model and the newly developed lightweight
chaotic map will be introduced. Moreover, we will
analyze the chaotic performance of the presented map
2833
in terms of bifurcation diagram, Lyapunov exponent,
as well as 0–1 test.
2.1 P-tensor product compressive sensing model
In traditional compressive sensing model, the mea-
surement matrix must match the dimensions of plain
image before the matrix multiplication can be per-
formed [12]. Therefore, Ref. [13] introduces a new
compression model based on Kronecker product, that
is p-tensor product compressive sensing (PTP-CS)
model. It can realize the multiplication operation of
matrices with different dimensions, thereby abating
the storage space of measurement matrix in the signal
compression and reconstruction process.
In PTP-CS model, assuming that the plain image is
denoted as X 2 Rqq , the discrete two-dimensional
wavelet packet transform basis, an orthogonal sparse
basis, is expressed as the W 2 Rqq ; then, the sparse
domain conversion process of the plain image is
expressed as:
X ¼WS ð1Þ
where S 2 Rqq represents the sparse coefficient of
plain image X in W domain.
The pivotal difference between the traditional
compression model and PTP-CS model lies in the
way of constructing the measurement matrix. And the
framework of PTP-CS model can be expressed as:
Y ¼ UP.  X ð2Þ
where the symbol P
. represents P-tensor product. So,
there is
Y ¼ UP.  X ¼ ðU  PÞ  X ¼ ðU  PÞ  W  S
ð3Þ
where  stands for the Kronecker Product. Suppose
U 2 Rmn , P 2 Rtt , m\n, t ¼ floorðq  n1 Þ, the
matrix U is written as a vector, that is
U ¼ ½u1 ; u2 ; :::; un . And then the P-tensor product
of the matrix can be expressed as:
0 1
u11 P    u1n P
B .. C
U  P ¼ ðu1 P; :::; un PÞ ¼ @ ... ..
. . A
um1 P    umn P
ð4Þ
123
2834 X. Rong et al.

Therefore,U  P 2 RðmtÞðntÞ and Y 2 Rðmqn Þq .

1

Additionally, the coefficients mn1 and qn1 are,

respectively, called as the compression rate and the
magnification factor of the matrix. In PTP-CS model,
the matrix U is a random number matrix, such as
Gaussian matrix, Bernoulli matrix, and chaotic matrix,
and the matrix P can be an identity matrix or a random
number matrix. In our encryption scheme, the matrix
U and P are the pseudo-random matrix generated by
the newly designed chaotic map and the identity
matrix, respectively.

2.2 The definition of newly designed chaotic map Fig. 3 The chaotic sequence generated by the Simulink model

A new one-dimensional chaotic map with simple some fixed points, indicating that the presented map is
structure is presented in this subsection. Its iterative of ergodicity.
function is defined by Eq. (5), where the symbol l 2
½1:5; 1:5 is the controlling parameter. 2.3 Performance analysis of newly designed
8 chaotic map
> f : ½0; 1 ! ½0; 1
<
rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
 ffi
 
: f ðxi Þ ¼ xi ¼ cosðl  xi1 Þ  x3i1 þ 1 1 xi1 
> 2.3.1 Bifurcation diagram analysis

ð5Þ The bifurcation diagram reflects the long-term evolu-

In the above equation, the fractional structure is
employed to separate the points of two adjacent
orbitals in phase space. And the constant ‘‘1’’ is used to
make the equation valid. Then, the root-square oper-
ation and the absolute value operation are to restrict
the output value of this map between 0 and 1, thus
avoiding exceeding the finite word length (FWL) of
the adopted soft hardware device. Additionally, the
simulation model of the presented chaotic map and its
generated time sequence are depicted in Figs. 2 and 3.
It can be seen from Fig. 3 that as the iterative number
increases, the output value produced by this map
oscillates in the interval [0, 1], rather than tending to
tive state of the time sequence produced by the
nonlinear system under determinate initial conditions,
including stable, unstable, periodic, and chaotic state
[14]. Then, under the condition that x0 is stochastically
set to 0.72345, the bifurcation diagram of the newly
developed one-dimensional chaotic map is drawn in
Fig. 4. Obviously, it can be seen that unlike the
traditional logistic chaotic map, of whose time
sequence goes through four different evolution stages:
stable fixed point ? unstable fixed point ? pe-
riod ? chaos, the exploited nonlinear map in this
paper has always been in chaotic state within the
interval ½1:5; 1:5.

Fig. 2 The Simulink model

of newly designed chaotic
map

123
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed 2835

quantitatively calculated and plotted in Fig. 5. It is

observed that compared with other advanced low-
dimensional chaotic maps, the proposed chaotic map
in this paper has stable LE values that are always
greater than 0, manifesting that the adjacent trajecto-
ries are separated exponentially in a certain direction
of phase space, and the developed map is extremely
sensitive to the initial state.

2.3.3 0–1 test analysis

The 0–1 test is a reliable and effective binary test

method proposed by Gottwald and Melbourne to
detect whether the system is chaotic or not [19]. In
addition, compared with other detection methods, the
Fig. 4 The bifurcation diagram of proposed chaotic map
most prominent advantage of this method is that it
2.3.2 Lyapunov exponent analysis does not require phase space reconstruction during the
test. As far as the chaotic sequence X is concerned, its
The Lyapunov exponent (LE) can not only measure test result can be determined by Eq. (7).
8 !
the average change rate of exponential separation n  
>
> 1X
>
>
> K ¼ lim ln ½p ð i þ n Þ  p ð iÞ  2
þ ½s ð i þ nÞ  s ð iÞ 2
 lnðnÞ1
(LE [ 0) or aggregation (LE \ 0) of two trajectories >
>
<
n!1 N i¼1
Pn
that are close to each other in the phase space over > pðnÞ ¼ X ðiÞ cosðirÞ
>
> i¼1
time, but also quantitatively describe the sensitivity of >
> Pn
>
>
: sðnÞ ¼ X ðiÞ sinðir Þ
chaotic map to initial value [15]. As for the 1-D i¼1

chaotic map f ðxÞ, the LE value can be calculated by ð7Þ

the following equation.
where the signs r and N are arranged as ½0:25p; 0:8p
 
1X N df ðxÞ
 
and 1000, respectively. Then, Fig. 6 demonstrates the
LE ¼ lim ln  ð6Þ 0–1 test results of the chaotic sequences generated by
N!1 N dx
n¼0
several 1-D chaotic maps under different control
Next, the impact of control parameters on the LE parameter values. As shown in Fig. 6, the nonlinear
values of several 1-D chaotic maps [16–18] is map we proposed has a wider and more stable K value,
indicating that the developed map with simple

Fig. 5 Lyapunov exponent diagram of different chaotic maps Fig. 6 0–1 test results of different chaotic maps

123
2836
structure has good chaotic performance, compared to
those proposed in Ref. [16–18].
3 Proposed data encryption scheme
In this section, the technical details of the proposed
visually meaningful data encryption (VMDE)
scheme will be introduced. And its complete frame-
work is illustrated in Fig. 7. It can be seen from this
figure that the plain image data collected by sensor
device are first subjected to the sparse preprocessing,
scrambling, compression, and diffusion to produce the
secret image without visual semantic features. Then,
the OPTB embedding technology is employed to hide
the secret image data stochastically into the openly
accessible carrier image in space domain, so as to
achieve synchronous protection of plain data content
and visual security. In other aspects, the visually
secure cipher image is transmitted to the decryption
terminal through WBANs, and the final reconstructed
image is acquired by extracting, decrypting, and
decompressing it. Next, the specific encryption and
decryption process is as follows.
Fig. 7 Framework of the proposed visually meaningful image encryption and decryption scheme
123
X. Rong et al.
3.1 Encryption stage
3.1.1 Sparse preconditioning
First, the plain image P 2 NNN is subjected to the 2-
D discrete wavelet packet transform to obtain the
plaintext sparse coefficient matrix P1 2 RNN . Next,
to further improve the sparsity of coefficient matrix P1
and the visual quality of reconstructed image, the
threshold processing and the 2-D Arnold scrambling
operations are applied to P1, and then, the matrix
generated by this process is named as P2 2 RNN .
Furthermore, the mathematical definition of Arnold
scrambling is displayed in Eq. (8), where the vectors
Xa and Xb are, respectively, gained by sorting the
chaotic sequence generated by the 3-D fractional-
order discrete chaotic neural network [20] (displayed
in Eq. (9)) under the control of the secret keys.
   
in 1 Xa in1 N
¼  mod
jn Xb Xa  Xb þ 1 jn1 N
ð8Þ
where the symbols ½in1 ; jn1  and ½in ; jn  mean the
coordinates of the pixel point in the two matrices
before and after the scrambling operation, respec-
tively. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the
reason why the 2-D Arnold confusion is adopted in the
proposed encryption scheme is that it has the hard-
ware-friendly feature and good scrambling effect.
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed 2837

8
> hv 3.1.3 Diffusion stage
>
> xiþ1 ¼ xi þ ½xi þ 2 sinðxi Þ þ sinðyi Þ  9 sinðzi Þ
>
> Cð1 þ vÞ
>
< v
h Since the essence of the compressive sensing model is
yiþ1 ¼ yi þ ½yi  9 sinðxi Þ þ 2 sinðyi Þ þ sinðzi Þ
>
> Cð1 þ vÞ
>
> hv linear measurement, it cannot withstand the differen-
>
>
: ziþ1 ¼ zi þ ½zi þ sinðxi Þ  9 sinðyi Þ þ 2 sinðzi Þ tial attacks [21]. Therefore, it is necessary to perform
Cð1 þ vÞ
the diffusion processing on the compressed image C,
ð9Þ
so that tiny differences among plain images will cause
where the variables h 2 Rþ and v 2 ð0; 1Þ, respec- the generated non-semantic cipher images to differ
tively, represent the discretization step size and the greatly. Then, perform the bidirectional Modulo-Plus
R1
fractional order. Moreover, the CðsÞ ¼ 0 ts1 et dt operation on the compressed image C, as shown in
denotes the Gamma function. Eq. (14), where the D is determined by quantizing
chaotic sequence generated by the 3-D fractional-
3.1.2 PTP-CS stage order chaotic neural network. At this point, the data
content encryption of plain image is completed.
First, under the condition of given initial states, iterate 8 ð1Þ
>
> T ¼ m0 þ C ð1Þ þ Dð1Þ mod 256
the newly developed 1-D chaotic map to obtain the < mðnÞ ðn1Þ
Tm ¼ Tm þ C ðnÞ þ DðnÞ mod 256
chaotic sequence X. And then to make the sequence X ðendÞ ðendÞ
>
: EðendiÞ¼ m0 þ
> Tm þ DðendÞ mod 256
more stochastic, perform further processing on it ðendiþ1Þ ðendiÞ
E ¼E þ Tm þ DðendiÞ mod 256
according to Eq. (10), where the constant d is the
preset sampling distance. ð14Þ

WðiÞ ¼ 1  2  XðdiÞ ð10Þ

3.1.4 Embedding stage
Then, the chaotic sequence W is reshaped into the 2-
D matrix with column-wise manner and normalized to As far as the existing conventional encryption
produce the random number matrix U, shown as
 schemes are concerned, the ciphertext data generated
1 0 by them have pseudo-random features. When it is
Eq. (11). And the matrix P is set to .
0 1 transmitted into the public channel, it is enormously
2 3 easy to attract the attention of hackers and suffer
W1 W0:125Nþ1    WNðN2Þ=16þ1
rffiffiffiffi6
4 6 W2 W0:125Nþ2    WNðN2Þ=16þ2 7
various attacks. Thus, our proposed scheme adopts the
7
U¼ 6 .. .. .. .. 7 lossless matrix coding-based embedding method,
N 4 . . . . 5
denoted as the OPTB embedding, to hide the noise-
WN=8 WN=4  WN 2 =16 like secret image into the non-secret transmission
ð11Þ medium-carrier image. That is, to abate the probability
of being attacked by adding a visual label to the secret
Finally, the compressed image C 2 N0:25NN can
image. Moreover, the OPTB embedding is a simple
be generated by performing the parallel measurement
and feasible large-capacity embedding approach,
and quantization operations on the matrix P2 2 RNN .
which combines the multi-plane embedding and the
Additionally, this process can be expressed by
matrix encoding. Next, the detailed embedding pro-
Eqs. (12) and (13).
cess is illustrated in Algorithm 1, where the meanings
P3 ¼ UP.  P2 ¼ ðU  PÞ  P2 ð12Þ of these symbols adopted are all the library functions
in MATLAB.
C ¼ ð2a  1Þ  ðP2  Pmin Þ  ðPmax  Pmin Þ1
ð13Þ
where the variable a represents the bit depth of digital
image, the constants Pmax and Pmin stand for the
extremes of the matrix P2.

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2838
3.2 Decryption Stage
The flowchart of proposed decryption scheme is
illustrated in the lower part of Fig. 7. And when the
decryption terminal obtains the decryption keys
through the secure channel, the plain image can be
recovered by performing the following operations on
the visually secure cipher image transmitted in public
channel.
Step 1: Firstly, the newly designed chaotic map and
the three-dimensional fractional-order chaotic neural
network are iterated through the received secret keys
to generate the corresponding secret code streams.
Step 2: Then, according to Algorithm 2, the secret
data E 2 N0:25NN are losslessly extracted from the
visually secure cipher image S 2 NNN .
Step 3: Next, perform inverse diffusion and inverse
quantization operations on the secret image to obtain
the compressed data C 2 N0:25NN .
Step 4: Finally, the decrypted image is recovered by
performing the smoothed l0 norm (SL0) algorithm and
123
X. Rong et al.
inverse 2-D Arnold scrambling operation on the
compressed data P3 2 N0:25NN .
3.3 Discussion
In this section, we carefully introduce the technical
details of the proposed image encryption scheme. In
general, in virtue of newly developed 1-D chaotic
map, PTP-CS and OPTB embedding, the plain image
P 2 NNN is compressed and encrypted into the
cipher image with other visual features. Compared
with the existing encryption schemes applied in the
WBANs, the cipher images produced by our
scheme have a lower possibility of being attacked.
Taking into account the limited resources in sensor
nodes, the PTP-CS model is introduced in our
scheme to make the resolution of the generated cipher
image consistent with that of the plain image, so as to
avoid occupy the additional storage space and trans-
mission bandwidth. Meanwhile, the designed chaotic
map with simple structure can avoid consuming
excessive computing power. Additionally, the adopted
OPTB embedding method can hide secret data loss-
lessly, so that good reconstruction quality can be
obtained. To sum up, our proposed scheme improves
the performance of existing encryption schemes from
three aspects, namely visual security, execution effi-
ciency and compressibility.
Furthermore, the time complexity of encryption
scheme largely determines its own execution
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed
efficiency. First, in the construction phase of secret
code streams, time complexity Oðð0:25dCR þ 2ÞN 2 Þ
is applied to iterate the newly designed chaotic map
and the 3-D fractional-order chaotic neural network
for generating the chaotic sequences. And then in PTP-
CS phase, the time complexity consumed by the
Arnold scrambling operation is OðN 2 Þ. Next, in the
encryption stage, the compressed image is subjected to
two diffusion operations, occupying the time com-
plexity Oð2N 2 Þ. Finally, the secret image is embedded
into the non-secret-involved transmission medium, of
which part the time complexity occupied is
Oð4CR N 2 Þ. Therefore, the gross time complexity of
the proposed encryption scheme is OðcN 2 Þ, where the
sign c is a fixed constant.
As for the space complexity of the proposed
encryption scheme, an indicator frequently used to
measure the temporary storage space occupied by the
algorithm, it depends on the loop procedure to a great
extent. Hence, after analyzing each operation phase, it
can be concluded that the total space complexity of our
scheme is Oðð0:25d þ 4ÞCR N 2 þ 2N 2 Þ.
4 Simulation and analysis
4.1 Simulation environment and parameter
settings
The experimental conditions provided include the
laptop equipped with i7-8550U CPU and 16G RAM,
and MATLAB 2020a simulation platform. In the
experiment, the initial parameters of 3-D fractional-
order chaotic neural network utilized to generate the
secret code stream are ½0:08; 0:8; 6:2,h ¼ 0:05 and
v ¼ 0:6, respectively. In the construction process of
the measurement matrix, the initial states of newly
designed chaotic map are x0 ¼ 0:678,l ¼ 1:2 and the
sampling distance d ¼ 15. Additionally, some other
parameters are described as follows: The constant m0
in the diffusion stage is arranged to be 127, the basis
function employed in the sparse decomposition pro-
cess is the DB wavelet basis and the SL0 algorithm is
used to recover the reconstructed image.
2839
4.2 Image encryption and decryption effects
and analysis
Five plain images widely used for testing and five non-
secret-involved carrier images with the resolution of
512  512 are stochastically selected for simulation
experiments. And the encryption and decryption
results of our proposed scheme are demonstrated in
Fig. 8. It can be seen from this figure that the plain
images are effectively compressed and encrypted into
the noise-like intermediate secret images, realizing the
content protection of plaintext data. Furthermore, the
generated cipher images have visual semantics and are
highly similar to their corresponding carrier images. In
other respects, the decrypted images recovered from
the cipher images are no different from the corre-
sponding plain images. Next, the quantitative
approaches are adopted to evaluate the reconstruction
effect and visual security of our encryption scheme.
The PSNR and MSSIM are currently the most
commonly used indicators to evaluate the similarity of
two images, and their mathematical definitions are
given in Ref. [22]. Meanwhile, if the difference
between the two tested images is smaller, the larger the
values of the indicators adopted will be obtained. The
values of corresponding quantitative indicators in
Fig. 8 are listed in Table 1, where the symbols ‘‘dec’’
and ‘‘cip’’ are, respectively, denoted as the relation-
ship between plain image and decrypted image, as
well as between carrier image and cipher image. As
illustrated in Table 1, the average values of the
PSNRcip and MSSIMcip reach at 43.8 dB and 0.995,
indicating that the proposed encryption scheme has
fairly high-profile security level. That is to say, the
cipher image generated by our scheme is difficult to be
detected by human visual system (HVS) and steganog-
raphy analyzer, so it has low probability of intercep-
tion, eavesdropping and other security threats.
Additionally, without being affected by the noise
attacks, shearing attacks, and rotation attacks, the
decrypted images recovered from the cipher images
have good visual quality.
4.3 Influence of parameter settings on simulation
results
In our encryption scheme, some parameters will affect
the results of simulation experiments, such as the
control parameter of newly designed chaotic map,
123
2840 X. Rong et al.

Fig. 8 Simulation results of the proposed data encryption scheme. The (I) to (V) columns represent the plain images, the carrier images,
the intermediate secret images, the steganographic images and the decrypted images, respectively

compression rate and so on. Next, we will quantita-
tively evaluate their impact on the encryption and
decryption results to obtain the best performance. And
then five images with resolution of 512  512 are
randomly chosen for experimentation.
Since in the PTP-CS model, the measurement
matrix is constructed by the chaotic sequence and the
fixed identity matrix, the performance of the proposed
chaotic map directly affects the quality of measure-
ment matrix. Figure 9 gives the trend chart between
the control parameter of the proposed chaotic map and
the encryption and decryption results. As shown in this
figure, as the value of the control parameter continues
to increase, the reconstruction quality of the decrypted
image fluctuates, but the fluctuation range is less than
1 dB. And then the visual quality of the cipher image

123
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed 2841

Table 1 PSNR and Plain image Host image PSNRcip (dB) MSSIMcip PSNRcip (dB) MSSIMcip
MSSIM values of
simulation results Lena Baboon 36.8767 0.9459 43.9171 0.9967
Peppers Bridge 36.0992 0.9453 44.1171 0.9973
Airplane Sailboat 33.9213 0.9073 43.9730 0.9933
Cameraman Mountain 36.0384 0.9355 43.3899 0.9951
Goldhill Boat 33.6270 0.9015 43.8058 0.9936
Average 35.3125 0.9271 43.8406 0.9952

Fig. 9 Relationship curve between the control parameter of Fig. 10 Relationship curve between the compression rate and
chaotic map and the simulation results the reconstruction quality of decrypted image

remains unchanged. These results also indirectly
indicate that the designed nonlinear map has relatively
stable chaotic performance. Eventually, to acquire
better reconstruction effect, it is recommended that the
value of the control parameter should belong to
½1:2; 1:2.
After the embedding layer is removed, the influence
of the compression rate on the reconstruction quality
of the decrypted image is plotted in Fig. 10. As can be
clearly seen from this figure, the quality of the
decrypted image continually improves in the early
stage and then declines rapidly as the compression rate
increases. The reasons for this phenomenon are that,
on the one hand, as the dimension of the sparse
coefficient matrix increases, more plaintext informa-
tion will be lost after threshold processing. On the
other hand, it requires more iteration time to obtain
better reconstruction quality. However, in the pro-
posed scheme, the compression rate is restricted by the
embedding capacity and the reconstruction quality.
Thus, it varies between 0.2 and 0.25. Although the
plain image is compressed to one-fifth of the original
size, the quality of its reconstructed image is still
greater than 30 dB through the SL0 algorithm, indi-
cating that our scheme has quite good compression
performance.
In addition to the above discussion, some other
parameters also have an impact on the simulation
results, such as the initial states of the proposed
chaotic map and the sampling distance. However,
these effects are limited and can be ignored.
4.4 Security testing and analysis
This section will evaluate the ability of the proposed
encryption scheme to withstand the brute force
attacks, the statistical attacks, and the differential
attacks. The test results and analysis are shown below.
Key space and key sensitivity are two vital
evaluation indicators for resisting the brute force
attacks. In our scheme, chaotic map is applied to each
stage of encryption process, including sparse process-
ing, parallel compression and embedding. Because of
its extreme sensitivity to the initial state, the proposed

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2842
encryption scheme has fairly high key sensitivity. In
other aspects, taking the initial states and the control
parameters of two employed chaotic maps as the secret
keys, then the total key space of our method reaches
2325 , which is much larger than the theoretical value
2100 [23]. Additionally, other parameters can also be
regarded as the secret keys transmitted in the secure
channels, such as the quantization parameters, the
sampling distance, and the parameters of reconstruc-
tion algorithm. Therefore, the encryption scheme we
proposed has sufficient capabilities to withstand the
brute force attacks.
The histogram reflects the proportion of the pixel
distribution in grayscale image. Next, four plain
images (Lena, Peppers, Airplane and Goldhill) and
four carrier images (Baboon, Bridge, Sailboat and
Boat) with resolution of 512  512 are, respectively,
sent into the proposed encryption scheme for statis-
tical analysis experiments, and the experimental
results are plotted in Fig. 11. It can be seen from this
figure that the pixel value distribution of generated
intermediate secret image is approximately uniform,
and the histogram of cipher image is extremely similar
to that of the corresponding carrier image, which
implies that the pixel value distribution of plain image
Fig. 11 Results of the histogram analysis. The first to third rows, respectively, stand for the histograms of intermediate secret images,
the histograms of carrier images and the histograms of steganographic images
123
X. Rong et al.
is effectively protected through the OPTB embedding
method.
Differential analysis is a flexible and destructive
attack method, which refers to freely constructing
multiple special plain images for encryption and then
analyzing the relationship of plaintext–ciphertext
pairs to deduce the secret code stream of the encryp-
tion scheme. Next, the evaluation methods introduced
in Ref. [24], namely the NPCR and the UACI, are
employed to assess the anti-differential attack capa-
bility of the encryption scheme proposed in this paper.
And the eventual experimental results are listed in
Table 2. It is worth mentioning that the cipher images
generated by the proposed scheme are meaningful.
Therefore, the embedding procedure must be removed
before this experiment. From the experimental data
obtained, the values of NPCR and UACI are very close
to the theoretical values (99.59%, 33.55%) given in
Ref. [25], which implies that our VMDE scheme has
considerable resistance capability in terms of the anti-
differential attacks.
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed 2843

Table 2 Experiment results of the differential attack analysis

Plain image Lena Pepper Woman Girlface Boat Sailboat Mountain

NPCR 99.59% 99.51% 99.70% 99.71% 99.77% 99.81% 99.83%

UACI 34.10% 34.47% 33.62% 33.58% 34.20% 33.11% 32.22%

4.5 Robustness testing and analysis 4.6 Execution efficiency analysis

When the visually secure cipher image is transmitted
in the public transmission channel, noise pollution and
data packet loss will inevitably occur. Therefore, the
proposed encryption scheme is required to have a
certain degree of robustness. Next, to simulate this
effect, artificially add different intensities of masks
and ‘‘salt and pepper noise’’ (SPN) to the cipher image.
The experimental results are drawn in Fig. 12. It can
be clearly seen that as the attack intensity increases,
the visual quality of the reconstructed image continues
to decline. However, it is still semantic and readable to
a certain extent. Furthermore, since our scheme has the
vigoroso avalanche effect, that is, when an element in
cipher image changes slightly, the error will be spread
out. Thus, it is recommended to encrypt the plain
image block by block to obtain stronger robustness.
As far as the plain image ‘‘Lena’’ is concerned, the
total time required to encrypt and decrypt it, as well as
the proportion of each stage occupying the total time,
is drawn in Figs. 13 and 14. One can be observed from
these two figures that the time consumed in the
decryption phase is much greater than that in the
encryption phase. This is because the SL0 algorithm
adopted in reconstruction is the process of solving
convex optimization problems. Additionally, it is
worth mentioning that the sensor device is only
responsible for the synchronous encryption of the
plaintext data and appearance, while the decryption
process is carried out at the terminal with strong
computing power and sufficient storage resources, so
the cost of the decryption stage does not need to be
considered.
Table 3 lists the total encryption and decryption
time required for the plain image ‘‘Lena’’ with
different resolutions. It can be seen from these
experimental results that as the dimensionality of the

Original 10 × 10 block cropping 20 × 20 block cropping 0.005% SPN 0.05% SPN

(a) PSNRdec = 36.8767 (b) PSNRdec = 30.8526 (c) PSNRdec = 28.5124 (d) PSNRdec = 33.7815 (e) PSNRdec = 29.7305

Fig. 12 Experiment results of the robustness analysis. The first and second rows are the cipher images and the corresponding decrypted
images, respectively

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2844 X. Rong et al.

Fig. 13 Total encryption

time and time consumption
percentage of each
operational process

4.7 Comparison with other algorithms

In this subsection, the proposed VMDE scheme will be

Fig. 14 Total decryption time and time consumption percent-
age of each operational process
plain image changes from the 256  256 to
2048  2048, the gross time for encryption and
decryption increases exponentially. Therefore, it is
recommended to encrypt the plain image with block-
wise manner to enhance the running speed. Firstly, the
block operation can reduce the iteration times of
chaotic map and is convenient to concurrently process
each image sub-block in encryption stage. Secondly, it
is helpful to improve the convergence rate of convex
optimization process.
compared with other relevant state-of-the-art data
encryption schemes in terms of visual security,
compression performance, encryption efficiency and
anti-differential cryptanalysis performance. The
specific comparative experimental results and analysis
are as follows.
As for the meaningful encryption scheme, the
larger the values of the indicators PSNPcip and
MSSIMcip are, the better visual security will be
acquired. Table 4 lists the numerical results of visual
security comparison experiments in several visually
secure data encryption schemes. According to the
experimental data obtained, it can be seen that the
cipher image produced by our proposed encryption
scheme has the best visual quality. And compared with
the schemes in the Ref. [26, 27], the visual security has
been improved by nearly (20 dB, 0.29) and (12 dB,
0.001). In other respects, it also indicates that the
matrix coding-based information embedding method
has less damage to the original statistical characteris-
tics of the carrier image.
In our proposed scheme, the reconstruction quality
of decrypted image will be improved from the

Table 3 Encryption and decryption time of Lena images with different resolutions (Unit: s)
Resolution 256  256 512  512 1024  1024 2048  2048

Encryption time 0.2755 0.7915 3.7075 22.0174

Decryption time 0.8227 4.559 37.9988 498.9845

123
Meaningful data encryption scheme based on newly designed 2845

Table 4 Comparison of Plain image Host image PSNRcip (dB) MSSIMcip

PSNR and MSSIM values
for different visually secure Proposed Ref. [26] Ref. [27] Proposed Ref. [26] Ref. [27]
encryption schemes
Lena Peppers 43.9260 18.5136 31.7986 0.9918 0.6726 0.9903
Airplane Baboon 43.9227 23.3967 32.5976 0.9967 0.6991 0.9955
Girlface Goldhill 45.5624 28.2318 32.0647 0.9944 0.7021 0.9942
Barbara Bridge 44.1285 25.2321 31.7397 0.9973 0.7337 0.9946
Average 44.3849 23.8436 32.0502 0.9951 0.7019 0.9937

Table 5 Compression performance comparison with other Afterward, the numerical results of the encryption
encryption schemes efficiency comparison experiment with other schemes
[26, 28, 29] are listed in Table 6. It can be clearly seen
Plain image PSNRcip (dB)
that our proposed scheme has the shortest encryption
Proposed Ref. [27] Ref. [26] Ref. [28] time, and its lead is extended when adopting the large-
Lena 36.8767 32.9538 31.0864 33.0984 scale plain image. Numerically, the proposed VMDE
Peppers 36.0992 33.6672 31.1202 32.6477 scheme can lead to nearly 22%–69% improvement in
Goldhill 33.6270 31.9479 26.0089 32.9378 encryption efficiency. Furthermore, when the plain
Boat 32.8422 31.7007 27.3465 32.2659
image is processed with block-wise manner, the
Average 34.8613 32.5674 28.8905 32.7375
encryption efficiency will also be significantly
improved.
Eventually, the results of performance comparison
among the proposed data encryption scheme and those
following two aspects. First, in the PTP-CS model, by reported in Ref. [14, 30] in the respects of withstand-
performing Arnold scrambling on the plaintext coef- ing the differential attacks are elaborated in Table 7. It
ficient matrix, the limitation of restricted isometry can be concluded that our scheme possesses the best
property (RIP) of measurement matrix can be effec- immunity against differential analysis-based security
tively alleviated, thereby improving the quality of attack models on the whole.
reconstructed image [28]. Secondly, the completely
reversible OPTB embedding approach is adopted to
eliminate the truncation loss. The reconstruction 5 Conclusions
quality of the decrypted images recovered from the
cipher images through different data decryption As for the sensor data in the WBANs, this paper
schemes is written in Table 5. As can be observed presents a novel meaningful data transmission
from this table, compared with other schemes, our scheme based on PTP-CS, chaotic map and OPTB
proposed encryption scheme has better compression embedding for synchronize encryption and steganog-
performance. raphy. In this work, under the control of the newly
developed lightweight chaotic map, the PTP-CS

Table 6 Encryption efficiency comparison with other encryption schemes (Unit: s)

Item Lena (512  512) Lena (256  256)
Proposed Ref. [28] Ref. [29] Ref. [26] Proposed Ref. [28] Ref. [29] Ref. [26]

Encryption 0.5796 0.9265 1.2816 0.5471 0.1669 0.1574 0.3066 0.1386

Embedding 0.2119 0.9099 0.1782 2.0184 0.1086 0.2322 0.0480 0.2596
Total 0.7915 1.8364 1.4598 2.5655 0.2755 0.3896 0.3546 0.3982

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Table 7 Anti-differential cryptanalysis performance compar- References

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