A color image encryption scheme based on a 2D coupled chaotic system and diagonal scrambling algorithm

A novel color image encryption scheme is developed to enhance the security of encryption without increasing the complexity. Firstly, the plain color image is decomposed into three grayscale plain images, which are converted into the frequency domain coefficient matrices (FDCM) with discrete cosine transform (DCT) operation. After that, a two-dimensional (2D) coupled chaotic system is developed and used to generate one group of embedded matrices and another group of encryption matrices, respectively. The embedded matrices are integrated with the FDCM to fulfill the frequency domain encryption, and then the inverse DCT processing is implemented to recover the spatial domain signal. Eventually, under the function of the encryption matrices and the proposed diagonal scrambling algorithm, the final color ciphertext is obtained. The experimental results show that the proposed method can not only ensure efficient encryption but also satisfy various sizes of image encryption. Besides, it has better performance than other similar techniques in statistical feature analysis, such as key space, key sensitivity, anti-differential attack, information entropy, noise attack, etc.