Optical information processing techniques offer many advantages for data security applications. Optics offers many degrees of freedom like phase, spatial frequency and polarization to encode data more securely. Being inherently 2D, optical systems can process and relay 2D information in parallel resulting in higher through put rate compared to the electronic systems. The above advantages offered by optical information processing systems, coupled with advancements in enabling technologies like photorefractive crystals, spatial light modulators, charge coupled device cameras, and smart pixel technology have led to the increasing use of optoelectronic data processing techniques for security applications. This article reviews some of the optoelectronic techniques used for data encryption with an emphasis on the research in this area being done in the Photonics Group at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Date Published: 25 September 2001
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 4417, Photonics 2000: International Conference on Fiber Optics and Photonics, (25 September 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.441293

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4417:
Photonics 2000: International Conference on Fiber Optics and Photonics
S. K. Lahiri; Ranjan Gangopadhyay; Asit K. Datta; Samit K. Ray; B. K. Mathur; S. Das, Editor(s)