Effects of JPEG Compression on Vision Transformer Image Classification for Encryption-then-Compression Images

This paper evaluates the effects of JPEG compression on image classification using the Vision Transformer (ViT). In recent years, many studies have been carried out to classify images in the encrypted domain for privacy preservation. Previously, the authors proposed an image classification method that encrypts both a trained ViT model and test images. Here, an encryption-then-compression system was employed to encrypt the test images, and the ViT model was preliminarily trained by plain images. The classification accuracy in the previous method was exactly equal to that without any encryption for the trained ViT model and test images. However, even though the encrypted test images can be compressible, the practical effects of JPEG, which is a typical lossy compression method, have not been investigated so far. In this paper, we extend our previous method by compressing the encrypted test images with JPEG and verify the classification accuracy for the compressed encrypted-images. Through our experiments, we confirm that the amount of data in the encrypted images can be significantly reduced by JPEG compression, while the classification accuracy of the compressed encrypted-images is highly preserved. For example, when the quality factor is set to 85, this paper shows that the classification accuracy can be maintained at over 98% with a more than 90% reduction in the amount of image data. Additionally, the effectiveness of JPEG compression is demonstrated through comparison with linear quantization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to classify JPEG-compressed encrypted images without sacrificing high accuracy. Through our study, we have come to the conclusion that we can classify compressed encrypted-images without degradation to accuracy.