Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Real-Time Image Processing https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-020-00948-1 ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER Fast image encryption algorithm with high security level using the Bülban chaotic map Mohamed Zakariya Talhaoui 1  · Xingyuan Wang 1,2  · Mohamed Amine Midoun 1 Received: 4 July 2019 / Accepted: 22 January 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract In the last decades, a big number of image encryption schemes have been proposed. Most of these schemes reach a high- security level, however, their slow speeds due to their complex process make them unusable in real-time applications. Motivated by this, we propose a new efcient and high-speed image encryption scheme based on the Bülban chaotic map. Unlike most of the existing schemes, we make a wisely use of this simple chaotic map to generate only a few numbers of random rows and columns. Moreover, to further increase the speed, we raise the processing unit from the pixel level to the row/column level. Security of the new scheme is achieved through a substitution-permutation network, where we apply a circular shift of rows and columns to break the strong correlation of adjacent pixels. Then, we combine the XOR operation with the Modulo function to mask the pixels values and prevent any leak of information. High-security tests and simula- tion analysis have been carried out to demonstrate that the scheme is extremely secure and highly fast for real-time image processing at 80 fps (frames per second). Keywords Image encryption · Bülban map · Chaos theory · Real-time communication 1 Introduction With the fast growth of the multimedia technologies and communication networks, the amount of data stored and transmitted has exponentially increased. The security of this data became an increasingly important problem studied by many experts and researchers. Unfortunately, traditional text encryption schemes like data encryption standard (DES) [1], advanced encryption standard (AES) [2] or the RSA [3] algorithms are unable to protect image data, mainly due to the diferences that exist between text and image data, such as the bulky size of images, strong redundancy and strong correlation among adjacent pixels. Moreover, small distor- tions in the decipher image data are acceptable as it always depends on human perception. Therefore, considering the special properties of digital images, several image encryp- tion schemes were proposed using diferent kind of tech- nologies, such as chaotic maps [4–6], DNA encoding [7–9], quantum theory [10–12], scalable encoding [13], fexible compression and image inpainting [14], etc. [15]. Recently, chaos theory has been widely used in cryptog- raphy, due to its unique features like ergodicity, sensitivity to the parameters and initial values, unpredictability, random- like behavior, etc. Which matches the basic requirements of cryptography [16, 17]. Therefore, many of the proposed image encryption systems are based on popular chaotic maps like the logistic map [18, 19], sine map [20–22], tent map [23, 24], Arnold cat map [25, 26], etc. However, some new discovered chaotic maps [27–31] have not been yet used in the cryptography feld, even that they have a wider chaotic range, better ergodicity and unpredictability, and a simpler structure than several well-known chaotic maps. Moreover, most of the existing image encryption schemes make care- less use of the adopted chaotic maps where several chaotic values are generated for each pixel in the plain-text image. The generation of such a big number of chaotic values * Mohamed Zakariya Talhaoui talhaouizakariya@mail.dlut.edu.cn Xingyuan Wang wangxy@dlut.edu.cn Mohamed Amine Midoun aminemidoun31@mail.dlut.edu.cn 1 Faculty of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China 2 School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian 116026, China