Paper 2024/559
Convolution-Friendly Image Compression with FHE
Abstract
During the past few decades, the field of image processing has grown to cradle hundreds of applications,
many of which are outsourced to be computed on trusted remote servers.
More recently, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has grown
in parallel as a powerful tool enabling computation on encrypted data,
and transitively on untrusted servers. As a result, new FHE-supported applications have emerged, but not all
have reached practicality due to hardware, bandwidth
or mathematical constraints inherent to FHE. One example is processing encrypted images, where practicality is closely related to bandwidth availability.
In this paper, we propose and implement a novel technique for
FHE-based image compression and decompression. Our technique is a stepping stone
towards practicality of encrypted image-processing and
applications such as private inference, object recognition, satellite-image searching
or video editing.
Inspired by the JPEG standard, and with new FHE-friendly
compression/decompression algorithms, our technique allows a client
to compress and encrypt images before sending them to a server,
greatly reducing the required bandwidth.
The server homomorphically decompresses a ciphertext to obtain
an encrypted image to which generic
pixel-wise processing or convolutional filters can be applied.
To reduce the round-trip bandwidth requirement, we also propose
a method for server-side post-processing compression.
Using our pipeline, we demonstrate that a high-definition grayscale image (
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- Keywords
- Fully Homomorphic EncryptionImage ProcessingImage CompressionCKKS
- Contact author(s)
-
axel mertens @ esat kuleuven be
georgio nicolas @ esat kuleuven be
sergi rovira @ tii edu - History
- 2025-05-12: last of 3 revisions
- 2024-04-11: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2024/559
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/559, author = {Axel Mertens and Georgio Nicolas and Sergi Rovira}, title = {Convolution-Friendly Image Compression with {FHE}}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2024/559}, year = {2024}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/559} }