English

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

Cryptography and Security 2025-05-01 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.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}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:16:38.642Z