  A property of sparse representations in relation to their capacity for
information storage is discussed. It is shown that this feature can be used for
an application that we term Encrypted Image Folding. The proposed procedure is
realizable through any suitable transformation. In particular, in this paper we
illustrate the approach by recourse to the Discrete Cosine Transform and a
combination of redundant Cosine and Dirac dictionaries. The main advantage of
the proposed technique is that both storage and encryption can be achieved
simultaneously using simple processing steps.
