Abstract
In literature, chaotic economic systems have got much attention because of their complex dynamic behaviors such as bifurcation and chaos. Recently, a few researches on the usage of these systems in cryptographic algorithms have been conducted. In this paper, a new image encryption algorithm based on a chaotic economic map is proposed. An implementation of the proposed algorithm on a plain image based on the chaotic map is performed. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm can successfully encrypt and decrypt the images with the same security keys. The security analysis is encouraging and shows that the encrypted images have good information entropy and very low correlation coefficients and the distribution of the gray values of the encrypted image has random-like behavior.