Methods and apparatus for securely transmitting and processing digital image data

Methods and apparatus are provided for securely transmitting and processing digital image data for display. The invention provides for decomposing (12), compressing (30), and scrambling (16, 18, 20, 22, 24) digital image data and forwarding the decomposed, compressed and scrambled image data to a destination (300) where the image data is decompressed (32), re-composed (32), and descrambled (16', 18', 20', 22', 24') prior to display. In particular, digital image data is scrambled before or after being compressed and is subsequently descrambled (500) after being decompressed (400) and prior to display (600) such that unauthorized use of the image content is prevented. The invention can be used in conjunction with most standard block-based image compression algorithms such as JPEG as well as some types of wavelet transform based systems.