Abstract-In the last few decades, a numerous number of image encryption algorithm has been proposed based on scrambling. Scrambling is the most crucial part of confusiondiffusion based encryption techniques. In the current scenario, the scrambling techniques are used without knowing the cryptographic effect, quality and computational complexity. Hence, an comparative study on scrambling techniques (permutation) is required. In this paper, a comparative study has been done on different scrambling techniques like matrix transformation, bit plane scrambling, 2D mapping and key based row and columns shifting techniques. To determine the quality and efficiency of the scrambling techniques, correlation, entropy, computational complexity have been considered. From the test results it was found that matrix based image scrambling applied on Arnold Transform was the best among the considered techniques in terms of correlation.