Abstract
In this research article, we have designed a novel image encryption scheme based on Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and chaotic sequencing. We have studied sequences of different genes consisting of four bases, Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T) and Guanine (G), also known as nucleotides which are the fundamental code of life. The purpose of DNA is to store, copy and transmit the genetic information of the living organism. The proposed image encryption scheme uses the chaotic system to generate random sequences and to choose between two or more options. The image is totally transformed by first encoding it into DNA nucleotides, shuffling to achieve diffusion and then substitution is performed to achieve confusion. Then later the DNA fusion operation is performed on the DNA image and the DNA complements are applied on the resulting DNA image, a random number of times to break the residual correlation between the pixels. The cipher image has been tested to fulfill all the standard benchmarks to be categorized as a good ciphered image which includes entropy, correlation coefficient, Pearson’s chi square, peak signal to noise ratio, mean square error, mean absolute error, structure similarity indexed measures, differential analysis and histogram uniformity test.