Digital image scrambling based on elementary cellular automata

Image scrambling is the process of converting an image to an unintelligible format, mainly for security reasons. The scrambling is considered as a pre-process or a post-process of security related applications such as watermarking, information hiding, fingerprinting, and encryption. Cellular automata are parallel models of computation that prove an interesting concept where a simple configuration can lead to a complex behavior. Since there are a lot of parameters to configure, cellular automata have many types and these types differ in terms of complexity and behavior. Cellular automata were previously used in scrambling different types of multimedia, but only complex two-dimensional automata were explored. We propose a scheme where the simplest type of cellular automata is used that is the elementary type. We test the scrambling degree for different cellular automata rules that belong to classes three and four of Wolfram’s classification which correspond to complex and chaotic behavior; we also check the effect of other parameters such as the number of generations and the boundary condition. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme outperforms other schemes based on cellular automata in terms of scrambling degree.