Abstract
Secure transmission and storage of color images is gaining growing importance in recent years due to the proliferation of multimedia network applications. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme based on chaotic maps and genetic operators for encrypting color images. The capability of the proposed approach to efficiently generate cipher images with very low correlation coefficients of adjacent pixels is demonstrated through some experimental results for several benchmark images. It is also shown that the approach is very sensitive to any slight changes in the secret key values.