A visually meaningful medical image encryption scheme based on image steganography and memristive Hopfield neural networks

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/ae395d

Abstract With the advancement of telemedicine technology, the security of digital medical images has become increasingly important. To address this issue, this paper proposes a visually meaningful color medical image encryption algorithm. First, a high-dimensional chaotic sequence is generated using a memristive Hopfield neural network. Subsequently, multi-channel pixel permutation is performed based on a chaos-driven pseudo-random strategy, followed by the implementation of a double-layer diffusion mechanism integrating cellular automata and dynamic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) coding. Finally, a chaos-driven cross-channel least significant bit (LSB) embedding approach is adopted. Simulation experiments and security analyses demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent encryption performance, a large key space, and strong robustness against noise and data-loss attacks, thereby effectively ensuring the secure transmission of digital medical images.

Keywords: Hopfield neural network memristor chaotic sequence image encryption algorithm

Received: 16 November 2025
Revised: 07 January 2026
Accepted manuscript online: 16 January 2026

PACS:	87.18.Sn	(Neural networks and synaptic communication)
	84.30.Bv	(Circuit theory)
	05.45.-a	(Nonlinear dynamics and chaos)
	07.05.Pj	(Image processing)

Fund: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62202198), the Hunan Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 2024JJ7372 and 2022JJ40514), and the Scientific Research Project of the Hunan Provincial Department of Education (Grant No. 24A0550).

Corresponding Authors: Jianhua Xiao
E-mail: xiaojianhua@hnu.edu.cn

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Wei Yao(姚卫), Xiangyun Huang(黄翔云), Jianhua Xiao(肖捡花), Fei Yu(余飞), and Yichuang Sun(孙义闯) A visually meaningful medical image encryption scheme based on image steganography and memristive Hopfield neural networks 2026 Chin. Phys. B 35 068702

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A visually meaningful medical image encryption scheme based on image steganography and memristive Hopfield neural networks

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