Image Encryption Using Chaotic Maps of Various Dimensions: Review

Information Security is an important problem in communication. Information includes text, audio, video, image etc. When information is transferred through various networks, there is high chance of unauthorized access. In many fields such as medical science, military, geographic satellite images etc, high security of information is guaranteed using encryption. As a result, the data confidentiality, integrity, security, privacy as well as the authenticity has become an important issue for communication and storage of data via insecure channel like internet. The available encryption algorithms which are mainly used for textual data maynot be suitable for multimedia data like images. Image encryption can be done in different ways. Most of the encryption techniques have some security and performance issues. Nowadays many algorithms related to image encryption based on the chaotic method have been put forward to improve security during transmission of images. Chaos based encryption systems are mostly used because of their better performance and certain features like sensitivity to initial conditions, state ergodicity, randomness etc. The confusion and diffusion in image is increased using chaos. Chaotic maps have several advantages like enormous key space and high security. In order to reach higher performance, these chaotic based methods take advantage of the more and more complex behavior of chaotic signals. There are different dimensions of chaotic maps used for chaotic encryption like one dimensional, multidimensional and cascade chaotic system. The performance of each systems is determined by the statistical and security analysis. This work is a review of chaos based image encryption algorithms using chaotic maps of different dimensions.