A Secure Chaos-based Image Encryption and Decryption Using Crossover and Mutation Operator

In this world of digital media, security concerns are one of the most pondered tasks upon the dimension of communication. Now the researchers focus is on developing secure schemes which will enhance the security in the way of communication. In this paper, a secure chaos-based image encryption and decryption using crossover and mutation operator is proposed. The implementation is based on the chaotic logistic map is in combined with the crossover & mutation operator. The proposed methodology works in three steps. In the first step, initial population is formed by using the chaotic logistic map function. In the second step, 4-point crossover operation is performed between the two adjacent bytes. Finally, in the last step, Mutation (2-point crossover) is performed within a single byte. In the similar way, the decryption operation is performed. The proposed image encryption scheme is simple and easy to implement. The experimental results and security analysis show that the proposed image encryption and decryption scheme not only achieve good encryption effect but also obtain best entropy (7.9953 for ‘Lena’ Image, 7.9933 for ‘Cameraman’ image and 7.9934 for ‘Peppers’ image) and correlation coefficient (– 0.0125 for ‘Lena’ image and – 0.0074 for ‘Cameraman’ image) through only one round encryption process. The major advantage of proposed method is that even in the first iteration, the use of crossover and mutation operation gives better results. The correlation coefficient and entropy results show that the proposed method is highly efficient as compared with the other methods.