: This paper introduces the complex Rayleigh–van-der- Pol–Duffing oscillators (RVDOs), which are hyperchaotic and can be autonomous or nonautonomous. The fundamental dynamics of the autonomous and nonautonomous complex RVDOs, including dissipation, symmetry, fixed points, and stability, are studied. These oscillators are found in various necessary fields of physics and engineering. The paper proposes a scheme to achieve phase synchronization (PS) and antiphase synchronization (APS) for different dimensional models. These kinds of synchronization are considered a generalization of several other types of synchronization. We use the active control method based on Lyapunov’s stability theory for this scheme. By analytically determining the control functions, the scheme achieved PS and APS. Our scheme is applied to study the PS of hyperchaotic behaviors for two distinct hyperchaotic nonautonomous and autonomous complex RVDOs. Additionally, the scheme is employed to achieve the APS of a chaotic real nonautonomous RVDO and a hyperchaotic complex autonomous RVDO, including those with different dimensions. Our work presents numerical results that plot the amplitudes and phases of these hyperchaotic behaviors, demonstrating the achievement of the PS and APS. The encryption and decryption of grayscale images are researched based on APS. The experimental results of image encryption and decryption are computed with information entropy, visual analysis, and histograms.