Preserving the confidentiality of digital images using a chaotic encryption scheme

Confidentiality of digital images is an important requirement for many multimedia applications and services. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of digital images is essential. Digital images are usually very large and encrypting such bulky data induces many performance overheads, which can be too expensive for real-time applications in resource constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a chaotic image encryption scheme which satisfies the need for both lightweightedness and security. To justify the security and efficiency, the new cipher was evaluated using a series of statistical tests. These tests included a visual testing and a histogram analysis, a randomness analysis, a correlation analysis, an entropy analysis and an image encryption quality analysis. Based on all analyses and experimental results, it is concluded that the proposed scheme is effective, efficient and trustworthy and therefore can be adopted for image encryption.