Spatiotemporal patterns in FitzHugh-Nagumo network and its application in image encryption.

Abstract

The investigation on neuronal dynamics advances the understanding of remarkable characters of the brain. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the FitzHugh-Nagumo system from single neuron to neuronal network. The neuron exhibits the bursting, spiking and chaotic firing patterns, and the energy function is applied to analyze these patterns. The bursting firing mode has a higher energy oscillation than the chaotic firing pattern. In addition, the coupled FHN system is constructed by the electrical synaptic connection.The phase lock is obtained in the coupled system, and it plays an essential role in biological rhythms. In the grid-like FHN network, the energy diversity induces the target wave, and the spatiotemporal pattern appears with the transition between resting and exciting states. The complex spatial patterns show their valuable applications in the image encryption. Therefore, an encryption scheme is proposed based on the FHN network, and different tests indicate the encryption strategy has good secure performance. The strategy has a larger key space, and it saves more time due to its network structure. In addition, the scheme is implemented on the FPGA platform, and it further indicates the feasibility and parallelization of the proposed scheme. It sheds light on the image processing basing on the neuronal network.