An improved permutation-diffusion type image cipher with a chaotic orbit perturbing mechanism.

During the past decades, chaos-based permutation-diffusion type image cipher has been widely investigated to meet the increasing demand for real-time secure image transmission over public networks. However, the existing researches almost exclusively focus on the improvements of the permutation and diffusion methods independently, without consideration of cooperation between the two processes. In this paper, an improved permutation-diffusion type image cipher with a chaotic orbit perturbing mechanism is proposed. In the permutation stage, pixels in the plain image are shuffled with a pixel-swapping mechanism, and the pseudorandom locations are generated by chaotic logistic map iteration. Furthermore, a plain pixel related chaotic orbit perturbing mechanism is introduced. As a result, a tiny change in plain image will be spread out during the confusion process, and hence an effective diffusion effect is introduced. By using a reverse direction diffusion method, the introduced diffusion effect will be further diffused to the whole cipher image within one overall encryption round. Simulation results and extensive cryptanalysis justify that the proposed scheme has a satisfactory security with a low computational complexity, which renders it a good candidate for real-time secure image storage and distribution applications.