Yaru Liang, Bo Peng, Renxin Liu, Huamao Zhou, Nanrun Zhou, Xingtong Wu
As information technology evolves rapidly, image data is exposed to growing risks of security breaches and privacy leaks during transmission and storage. Therefore, image encryption has attracted significant attention as an effective protection measure. Nevertheless, most chaos-driven image encryption schemes suffer from inferior chaotic randomness, making them prone to cryptanalytic cracking in practice. To solve this problem, a new image encryption scheme is proposed by integrating the fireworks algorithm with a convolution operation. First, the original image is permuted via the Arnold transform and an improved permutation strategy. Then, the classical Logistic map is iterated to generate an initial pseudo-random sequence, which is further optimized by the fireworks algorithm. Finally, a reversible convolution operation is integrated with a bit-level diffusion mechanism to achieve image encryption. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme exhibits superior performance in terms of statistical analysis, robustness analysis, and image-quality assessment, and it possesses remarkable security against various cryptanalytic attacks.