Arbitrarily modulated beam for phase-only optical encryption
Wen Chen, Xudong Chen · Journal of Optics · 2014
Optical encryption has attracted more and more attention recently due to its remarkable advantages, such as parallel processing and multiple-dimensional characteristics. In this paper, we propose to apply an arbitrarily modulated beam for phase-only optical encryption. In optical security systems, the plane wave is commonly used for the illumination, and unauthorized receivers may easily obtain or estimate the information related to the illumination beam. The proposed strategy with an arbitrarily modulated illumination beam can effectively enhance system security, since a beam modulation pattern (such as a pinhole-array pattern or a random phase-only pattern) can be considered an additional security key. The phase-only optical encryption is taken as an example for illustrating the validity of the proposed method; however it could be straightforward to apply the proposed strategy to other optical security systems.