This paper presents a novel random selective image encryption scheme.In the scheme,image is firstly permutated by position and high four-bits of pixel; then the permutated image is diffused by adaptive random selective encryption based on hyper-chaos.The highlights of the scheme lie in that the high performance of the algorithm can be achieved through adaptive selection pixels for encryption through chaos search,and the chaos search can be accomplished in the whole image pixels or partial pixels.Large numbers of experiments and comparisons with the existing methods show the better performance of the proposed scheme.