A Novel Image Encryption Approach Based on a Hyperchaotic System, Pixel-Level Filtering with Variable Kernels, and DNA-Level Diffusion.

With the rapid growth of image transmission and storage, image security has become a hot topic in the community of information security. Image encryption is a direct way to ensure image security. This paper presents a novel approach that uses a hyperchaotic system, Pixel-level Filtering with kernels of variable shapes and parameters, and DNA-level Diffusion, so-called PFDD, for image encryption. The PFDD totally consists of four stages. First, a hyperchaotic system is applied to generating hyperchaotic sequences for the purpose of subsequent operations. Second, dynamic filtering is performed on pixels to change the pixel values. To increase the diversity of filtering, kernels with variable shapes and parameters determined by the hyperchaotic sequences are used. Third, a global bit-level scrambling is conducted to change the values and positions of pixels simultaneously. The bit stream is then encoded into DNA-level data. Finally, a novel DNA-level diffusion scheme is proposed to further change the image values. We tested the proposed PFDD with 15 publicly accessible images with different sizes, and the results demonstrate that the PFDD is capable of achieving state-of-the-art results in terms of the evaluation criteria, indicating that the PFDD is very effective for image encryption.