CryptoUNets: Applying Convolutional Networks to Encrypted Data for Biomedical Image Segmentation

In this manuscript, we demonstrate the feasibility of a privacy-preserving U-Net deep learning inference framework, namely, homomorphic encryption-based U-Net inference. That is, U-Net inference can be performed solely using homomorphic encryption techniques. To our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve support perform implement enable U-Net inference entirely based on homomorphic encryption ?.The primary technical challenge lies in data encoding. To address this, we employ a flexible encoding scheme, termed Double Volley Revolver, which enables effective support for skip connections and upsampling operations within the U-Net architecture.We adopt a tailored HE-friendly U-Net design incorporating square activation functions, mean pooling layers, and transposed convolution layers (implemented as ConvTranspose2d in PyTorch) with a kernel size of 2 and stride of 2. After training the model in plaintext, we deploy the resulting parameters using the HEAAN homomorphic encryption library to perform encrypted U-Net inference.

@article{chiang2025_2504.21543,
  title={ CryptoUNets: Applying Convolutional Networks to Encrypted Data for Biomedical Image Segmentation },
  author={ John Chiang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.21543},
  year={ 2025 }
}