SUMMARYIn this paper, a chaos-based communication system in the presence of unknown transmission delay is studied. First, under master/slave configurations, two chaotic Chen systems as the slaves are synchronized with a master one via unidirectional coupling. Then at the transmitter, information of an image is embedded within a slave-one signal and the resultant signal along with another one which is used to determine the transmission delay is transmitted to the receiver. At the receiver, using the received signals and the slavetwo counterpart signal, the image is recovered. The performance of the proposed method is experimentally illustrated.