Privacy Protection in JPEG XS: A Lightweight Spatio-Color Scrambling Approach

This paper presents a lightweight JPEG XS coding scheme incorporating spatio-color scrambling for privacy protection. The proposed approach follows an Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) framework, maintaining compatibility with the JPEG XS standard. Prior to encoding, input images undergo scrambling operations, including line permutation, line reversal, and color permutation. Security analysis indicates that the scrambling technique provides a large key space, making brute-force attacks computationally challenging. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a rate-distortion (RD) performance nearly equivalent to conventional JPEG XS compression while enhancing visual security. Additionally, a rectangular block-based scrambling technique is explored, which offers a trade-off among low latency, reduced memory usage, and visual concealment performance. While real-time processing is possible with or without block-based scrambling, the block-based approach is particularly beneficial for applications that demand lower latency and reduced memory usage. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through simulations on 8K ultra-high-definition (UHD) images.