Optical cryptographic system employing multiple reference-based joint transform correlation technique

An optical joint transform correlation-based cryptographic system is a used to feed multiple phase-shifted encryption keys into four parallel channels along with a to-be-encrypted signal in the form of an image. The resulting joint power spectra (JPS) signals are phase-shifted and then combined to yield a modified JPS signal. Inverse Fourier transformation of the modified JPS signal yields the secured encrypted image. For decryption purpose, the received encrypted signal is first Fourier transformed and multiplied by the encryption key used in encryption. The derived signal is then inverse Fourier transformed to generate the output signal. The proposed system offers a nonlinear encryption without the involvement of any complex mathematical operation on the encryption key otherwise required in similar encryption techniques and is invariant to noise. Computer simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with binary, as well as gray images in both noise-free and noisy environment.