In this paper, a novel yet simple encryption technique is proposed based on toral automorphism, Markov map and singular value decomposition (SVD). The core idea of the proposed scheme is to scramble the pixel positions by the means of toral automorphism and then encrypting the scrambled image using Markov map and SVD. The combination of Markov map and SVD changed the pixels values significantly in order to confuse the relationship among the pixels. Finally, a reliable decryption scheme is proposed to construct original image from encrypted image. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed scheme. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.