The majority of existing methods of optical encryption use not only light intensity distribution, easily registered with photosensors, but also its phase distribution. This provides best encryption strength for fixed quantities of elements and phase levels in a mask. Downsides are holographic registration scheme used in order to register not only light intensity distribution but also its phase distribution and speckle noise occurring due to coherent illumination. That factors lead to very poor decryption quality when it comes from computer simulations to optical implementations.

Method of optical encryption with spatially incoherent illumination does not have drawbacks inherent to coherent systems, however, as only light intensity distribution is considered, mean value of image to be encrypted is always above zero which leads to intensive zero spatial frequency peak in image spectrum. Therefore, in case of spatially incoherent illumination, image spectrum, as well as encryption key spectrum, cannot be white. If encryption is based on convolution operation, no matter coherent light used or not, Fourier spectrum amplitude distribution of encryption key should overlap Fourier spectrum amplitude distribution of image to be encrypted otherwise loss of information is unavoidable.

Another factor affecting decrypted image quality is original image spectrum. Usually, most part of image energy is concentrated in area of low frequencies. Consequently, only this area in encrypted image contains information about original image, while other areas contain only noise. We propose to use additional encoding of input scene to increase size of the area containing useful information. This provides increase of signal-to-noise ratio in encrypted image and consequentially increases quality of decrypted images.

Results of computer simulations of test images optical encryption with spatially incoherent illumination and additional input amplitude masks are presented.

Date Published: 27 April 2016
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9889, Optical Modelling and Design IV, 98891I (27 April 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2227596

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9889:
Optical Modelling and Design IV
Frank Wyrowski; John T. Sheridan; Youri Meuret, Editor(s)