Privacy-Preserving Image Captioning with Partial Encryption and Deep Learning

Bibliographic Details
Title: Privacy-Preserving Image Captioning with Partial Encryption and Deep Learning
Authors: Antoinette Deborah Martin, Inkyu Moon
Source: Mathematics, Vol 13, Iss 4, p 554 (2025)
Publisher Information: MDPI AG, 2025.
Publication Year: 2025
Collection: LCC:Mathematics
Subject Terms: double random phase encoding, deep learning, partial encryption, image captioning, privacy preserving, Mathematics, QA1-939
More Details: Although image captioning has gained remarkable interest, privacy concerns are raised because it relies heavily on images, and there is a risk of exposing sensitive information in the image data. In this study, a privacy-preserving image captioning framework that leverages partial encryption using Double Random Phase Encoding (DRPE) and deep learning is proposed to address privacy concerns. Unlike previous methods that rely on full encryption or masking, our approach involves encrypting sensitive regions of the image while preserving the image’s overall structure and context. Partial encryption ensures that the sensitive regions’ information is preserved instead of lost by masking it with a black or gray box. It also allows the model to process both encrypted and unencrypted regions, which could be problematic for models with fully encrypted images. Our framework follows an encoder–decoder architecture where a dual-stream encoder based on ResNet50 extracts features from the partially encrypted images, and a transformer architecture is employed in the decoder to generate captions from these features. We utilize the Flickr8k dataset and encrypt the sensitive regions using DRPE. The partially encrypted images are then fed to the dual-stream encoder, which processes the real and imaginary parts of the encrypted regions separately for effective feature extraction. Our model is evaluated using standard metrics and compared with models trained on the original images. Our results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to models trained on original and masked images and outperforms models trained on fully encrypted data, thus verifying the feasibility of partial encryption in privacy-preserving image captioning.
Document Type: article
File Description: electronic resource
Language: English
ISSN: 2227-7390
Relation: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/13/4/554; https://doaj.org/toc/2227-7390
DOI: 10.3390/math13040554
Access URL: https://doaj.org/article/f3e5488e8ed44795b5be8446e6e43989
Accession Number: edsdoj.f3e5488e8ed44795b5be8446e6e43989
Database: Directory of Open Access Journals
More Details
ISSN:22277390
DOI:10.3390/math13040554
Published in:Mathematics
Language:English