Secure image processing on mobile devices using J2ME

Abstract

Tele-medicine is one of the most significant and indispensable domains which has improved over the decades. Emergency communication between doctors in urban hospitals and rural hospitals is currently difficult. This can only be done using email or telephone call description. It becomes difficult and complicated especially after office hours when senior staff returns home. In this critical situation, using powerful and efficient mobile applications on portable devices such as mobile phones can be very effective to have a video-conferencing and long-range consultation of patients to solve neurosurgical problems. However, there are some important challenges which could prohibit these integrated systems and reduce the quality of the services. Limited memory capacity in mobile phones, low bandwidth, powerlessness of operating system and small amount of power resources can cause unwanted results. In this work, we investigate and compare different securitization methods to encrypt and compress the image files on portable devices using J2ME and send information quickly over a secure channel in a remote distance to make decisions that can save lives. Moreover, we try to visualize 3D object model using 2D medical images on mobile phone with J2ME. The study evinces that mobile securitization is highly influenced by several parameters and specifications in J2ME. On the other hand, the results show that there are some challenges to constructing 3D object model with J2ME since graphic processing is extremely dependent on the current mobile hardware. The configurations and setting the related parameters appropriately play an important role in this work to clarify the manner of transferring the proposed application from emulator to J2ME platform in a mobile phone. Briefly, all parts in this research project are implemented based on J2ME and the PNG file format is selected as a medical image type to test our results in different sections. We developed a compression and decompression platform using gzip algorithm to hide the image file extension and make it unreadable for unknown users on J2ME. Furthermore, we continued our work by developing an encryption method based on Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES) encryption to secure our images on mobile phone. Finally, we applied the immediate mode of 3D modelling technique on 2D medical images to evaluate the processing time and image quality on J2ME. At the end, the experiments show that the image qualities are quite good on a mobile phone where the operating system supports J2ME. Also, the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) application that we created has a high performance and it is quite fast compared to other communication tools in transferring medical images of PNG file format from one mobile phone to another. Moreover, the experiments show that J2ME provides reasonable processing time in securitization mode and in constructing 3D models on portable devices.