The widespread use of UAV technology in fields such as surveillance, agriculture, defense, disaster management, and delivery services has led to an explosion of data collection, particularly in the form of high-resolution images and videos. These images often contain sensitive or critical information and therefore should be protected from unauthorized access or tampering. Encrypting UAV captured images is essential to ensure data security and privacy. This study introduces a new approach to securing images captured by UAVs through an innovative technique that combines a one-dimensional Exponential Sine (ES) chaotic map with Dynamic DNA encoding. The proposed ES chaotic map demonstrates strong chaotic behavior and unpredictability, which is validated through analysis using the bifurcation diagram and Lyapunov Exponent. The encryption scheme primarily consists of two phases: Dynamic 2D Circular Shift Permutation and Dynamic DNA Diffusion. The Dynamic 2D Circular Shift Permutation phase compute shift values dynamically using the ES chaotic map and shuffle rows and columns. In the second stage, Dynamic DNA encoding is utilized to alter the image pixels. The effectiveness of the proposed encryption method has been assessed through a range of standard evaluation metrics. The method achieved values of −0.0004, 7.9816, 99.67, 51.44 value of Correlation Coefficient (CC), information entropy, Number of Pixel Changing Rate (NPCR) and Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), respectively.
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