  The protection of confidential image data from unauthorized access is an
important area of research in network communication. This paper presents a
high-level security encryption scheme for gray scale images. The gray level
image is first decomposed into binary images using bit scale decomposition.
Each binary image is then compressed by selecting a good scanning path that
minimizes the total number of bits needed to encode the bit sequence along the
scanning path using two dimensional run encoding. The compressed bit string is
then scrambled iteratively using a pseudo-random number generator and finally
encrypted using a bit level permutation OMFLIP. The performance is tested,
illustrated and discussed.
