<p>A balance between security and computational efficiency is a key goal in image encryption. Traditional methods involve a number of calculations to achieve satisfactory resilience and make it hard to use in real-time environments. This research offers a new paradigm through the combination of Machine Learning (ML) methods with the improvement of the encryption’s space efficiency but preserving the security at the same time. A support vector machine (SVM) is used in the suggested method to divide blocks of image pixels into three types: low information, moderate information, and high information constituents. The encoding process just involves high as well moderate information blocks; low information blocks are left unaltered. There is a considerable reduction in processing overhead when using this selective encryption technique. The correlation, PSNR, MSE, entropy, energy, and contrast are the measures that are employed for evaluating the security of the proposed technique. These evaluation metrics prove exceptional results of accuracy 97.4%, entropy of 7.999, correlation of 0.0001, and energy of 0.0153. According to this work, there is clear progression in the field of image encryption since computational issues for machine learning driven selective encryption are elaborated. The approach is unique, reproducible and efficient to propose a solution to secure communications through encryption within today’s complex data transfer processes.</p>