Enhanced Playfair Cipher for Image Encryption using Integer Wavelet Transform

Objective: In this contemporary social networking era, it is no bewilderment that, information security breach is at its epitome, especially on texts/images. Thus there is a requisite for integrity for information to be transmitted over an insecure channel. Thus image/text encryption plays a vital preprocessing role in contemporary data transmission. Method: This paper analyses the performances of four novel, lossless methodologies of implementing the enhanced Playfair cipher in spatial and frequency domains, with integer wavelet transform (IWT) through lifting scheme. Findings: The proposed methods involve a spatial domain algorithm being applied to the frequency domain of the images for encryption which gives out better desired error metrics. Application: The most feasible method out of these proposed approaches can be chosen either as a stand-alone encryption and transmission mechanism or a pre-requisite step for that specific image in steganography and watermarking.