A Color Image Encryption Scheme Based on a Hybrid Cascaded Chaotic System

Abstract

As image is an important way of information representation, researchers pay more and more attention on image encryption. In order to improve the performance of image encryption, a novel image encryption scheme based on a hybrid cascaded chaotic system and sectoral segmentation is proposed in this paper. Hybrid cascaded chaotic system has a larger key space, higher complexity, more sensitivity to initial conditions. Four chaotic sequences relevant to a plain image are generated by this system, which strengthen plaintext correlation and the randomness. During the scrambling process, sectoral segmentation focuses on how to extract a sequence from the disk storing data, which can not only reduce the correlation between the three components of the image, but also hide image information to a large extent. Further, a DNA algorithm is used in the diffusion process. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme can effectively resist various attacks and improve the encryption performance.