With an exponential growth in the use of digital image data, the need for efficient transmission methods has become imperative. Traditional image compression techniques often sacrifice image fidelity for reduced file sizes, presenting a challenge in maintaining both quality and efficiency. They also tend to compromise on security, leaving images vulnerable to threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. This paper proposes an autoencoder architecture for image compression so as to not only help in dimensionality reduction but also inherently encrypt the images. The paper also introduces the use of a composite loss function that combines reconstruction loss and residual loss for improved performance. The autoencoder architecture is designed to achieve optimal dimensionality reduction and regeneration accuracy while safeguarding the compressed data during transmission or storage. Images regenerated by the autoencoder are evaluated against three key metrics: reconstruction quality, compression ratio, and one-way delay during image transfer. The experiments reveal that the proposed architecture achieves an SSIM of 97.5% over the regenerated images and an average latency reduction of 87.5%, indicating its effectiveness as a secure and efficient solution for compressed image transfer.
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