Optical image encryption based on a joint Fresnel transform correlator with double optical wedges.

Abstract

An optical cryptosystem based on the joint Fresnel transform correlator (JFTC) with double optical wedges is designed. The designed cryptosystem retains the two major advantages of JTC-based optical cryptosystems. First, the encrypted image is real-valued and therefore is easier to record and transmit. Second, the encryption process is simplified, since it doesn't require accurate alignment of optical elements or the generation of the complex conjugate of the key. Also, the designed optical cryptosystem can produce a decrypted image with higher quality than a JTC-based optical cryptosystem, because the original encrypted image is divided by the Fresnel transform power distribution of the key mask to generate the new encrypted image, which significantly reduces the noise during the decryption process. Simulation results showed that the correlation coefficient of the decrypted image and the original image can reach as large as 0.9819 after denoising and adequately selecting half-central interval a and encrypted image width w. Another improvement relative to JTC-based optical cryptosystems is that the attack resistibility gets enhanced due to the nonlinearity of the encryption process as well as the additional key parameter a, which enlarges the key space.