A new two-dimensional chaotic system in the form of a cascade structure is designed, which is derived from the Chebyshev system and the infinite collapse system. Performance analysis including trajectory, Lyapunov exponent and approximate entropy indicate that it has a larger chaotic range, better ergodicity and more complex chaotic behaviour than those of advanced two-dimensional chaotic system recently proposed. Moreover, to protect the security of the crowd image data, the newly designed two-dimensional chaotic system is utilized to propose a visually meaningful image cryptosystem combined with singular value decomposition and Bernstein polynomial. First, the plain image is compressed by singular value decomposition, and then encrypted to the noise-like cipher image by scrambling and diffusion algorithm. Later, the steganographic image is obtained by randomly embedding the cipher image into a carrier image in spatial domain through the Bernstein polynomialbased embedding method, thereby realizing the double security of image information and image appearance. Besides, the visual quality of the steganographic image can be improved by the adjustment factor according to different carrier images during the embedding process. Ultimately, security analyses indicate that it has higher encryption efficiency (2 Mbps) and the visual quality of steganography image can reach 39 dB.
INTRODUCTIONWith the rapid development and large-scale application of communication technologies, more and more digital images are generated and transmitted on public channels. For example, image sensors collect crowd information in real time for understanding and analysis. Because of their sharing and openness, digital images are easy to be acquired illegally or attacked maliciously. How to ensure the security of digital image information has become a hot research topic. Chaotic systems are characterized by pseudo-randomness, long-term unpredictability and high sensitivity to the initial states. Therefore, they are widely used in the design of secure communication systems. Since 1998, Fridrich [1] applied the chaotic system to the digital image encryption for the first time, creating a new era of image encryption, the chaotic image encryption algorithms have been developed qualitatively, especially the proposal of new chaotic systems and new encryption architectures [23][24][25][26][27].This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.