Review of Image Encryption Based on Bibliometrics and Visualized Analysis

Image encryption is a key technology for protecting image confidentiality and integrity in various applications. However, there is a lack of comprehensive and quantitative overview of the relevant publications in this field. This paper aims to fill this gap and explore the evolution and research frontier of image encryption. We collected papers from the WOS core database from 2005 to 2022 and used R programming language and VOSviewer to conduct bibliometric analysis and visualization. We analyzed the annual output, publication countries and institutions, journal sources, authors, and influential papers. We also visualized the author relationship, institutional cooperation relationship, keyword co-occurrence network, etc. We identified the research hotspots as: 1) chaotic systems; 2) optical encryption; 3) reversible information hiding; 4) deep learning; 5) visual encryption; 6) quantum image encryption. We found that: 1) the literature volume shows an overall upward trend; 2) China has a leading position and close cooperation with many countries; 3) quantum image encryption and deep learning image encryption are emerging topics with large development space. This paper provides valuable references for researchers and practitioners in the area of image encryption.