Abstract
Due to the growing of the use of Internet and communication media, image encryption is rapidly increased. Image sharing through unsafe open channels is vulnerable for attacking and stealing. For protecting the images from attacks, encryption techniques are required. Recently, new and efficient chaos-based techniques have been suggested to develop secure image encryption. This study presents a novel image encryption framework based on integrating the chaotic maps and color codes. Three phases are involved in the proposed image encryption technique. Piecewise chaotic linear map (PWLCM) is used in the first phase for permuting the digital image. In the second phase, substitution is done using Hill cipher which is the mixing of color codes with the permuted image. The third phase is implemented by XORing, a sequence generated by the chaotic logistic map (CLM). The proposed approach enhances the diffusion ability of the image encryption making the encrypted images resistant to the statistical differential attacks. The results of several analyses such as information entropy, histogram correlation of adjacent pixels, unified average changing intensity (UACI), number of pixel change rate (NPCR), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) guarantee the security and robustness of the proposed algorithm. The measurements show that the proposed algorithm is a noble overall solution for image encryption. Thorough comparison with other image encryption algorithms is also carried out.