The greatest issue in the age of information technology is safeguarding the real-time colour digital image. In this work, a colour picture encryption system based on the compression-then-encryption approach is developed to safeguard digital images. The proposed method is a hybrid combination of the Chaos techniques for key generation, Huffman Encoding/compression for compression and avoiding colour decomposition, scrambling for more confusion and Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) Encoding for reducing storage size. To enhance security, scrambled data are converted to the DNA sequence, make addition (ADD)operation, and apply the complementary rules to attain the cipher image. Experimental results have been proved as robustness, fast execution time, and high security against attacks, malicious attacks, differential attacks, and statistical attacks. Furthermore, results show that the proposed work as robustness, fast execution time and high security than the existing colour image encryption schemes.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA); Image Encryption; 5D chaotic map; Huffman Compression; Scrambling; Robustness