With the rapid development of computer network technology, information security has attracted increasing attention. Due to the characteristics of multi-dimensional operation and parallel processing capability, optical image encryption techniques have been receiving more and more attention. Since the well-known double random phase encoding technique was proposed, many other methods based on optical information processing means such as the use of optical transform, interference, and polarized light encoding, have been proposed for optical image encryption. However, recent researches have demonstrated that traditional optical encryption techniques are symmetric cryptosystems, in which decryption keys are identical to encryption keys and they have been found to be vulnerable to different types of attacks, such as known plaintext and chosen plaintext attacks. To overcome this shortcoming, asymmetric cryptosystems based on nonlinear phase-truncation techniques and phase retrieval algorithm have been proposed. Asymmetric cryptosystem is a cryptographic system in which encryption keys are different from decryption keys. The encryption keys are used as public keys which are disseminated widely, and the decryption keys are used as private keys which are known only to the authorized users. So, asymmetric cryptosystem can offer a higher-level security than symmetric cryptosystem. However, asymmetric cryptosystems based on phase retrieval algorithms require a lot of computational time, and asymmetric cryptosystems based on phase-truncated Fourier transforms have been found to be vulnerable to special attack. Therefore, in this paper, a novel asymmetric image encryption method is proposed by using the gyrator transform and vector operation. The original image is encrypted into two phase masks with vector operation. One is a random phase mask and the other is a phase mask related to the original image. In the encryption process, the random phase mask is used as a phase key and the other phase mask is transformed by gyrator transform. The transform result is performed by Fourier transform after being modulated by a phase distribution. The ciphertext is the amplitude of the above result. Compared with previous encryption schemes, the suggested method has two advantages. Firstly, we have proposed a new asymmetric encryption method based on the gyrator transform and vector operation. The decryption process is different from the encryption process. The gyrator transform and Fourier transform are used in the encryption process, while only the inverse operation of Fourier transform is employed in the decryption process. In addition, the decryption keys produced in the encryption process are different from the encryption keys. Therefore, the proposed scheme has high resistance against the conventional attacks. Secondly, the encrypted result is real-valued, which is convenient for display, transmission and storage.Numerical simulations illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed encryption scheme.