The design of image encryption schemes that make a good compromise between sufficient level of security and execution time is one of the main directions of research, due to their ever-increasing use in real-time Internet image encryption and transmission applications. For such task, a variety of mathematical and biological strategies are investigated in the literature as chaos theory, cellular automata and DNA computing. The intend of this paper is to present a complete study of some recent and prevalent proposed works in the literature, this study covers the analysis of each work by giving its advantages and limitations in terms of security level and execution time. We believe that our study within this contribution will help in the design of new secure crypto-systems for image encryption.