Simultaneous authentication verification of multiple secured images using joint transform correlation approach

Abstract

Optical techniques have been widely studied for securing and validating information, which is one of the most important challenges of the present time. In this work, we study simultaneous authentication of multiple input encrypted images which have been multiplexed in a single plane. The interference-based encryption architecture is used to generate two phase masks for each distinct image, which would serve as the phase lock and the phase key. The phases are made sparse by randomly retaining few pixels of the phase values. The phase locks corresponding to different images are then multiplexed in a single plane. For authenticating the phase masks, the concept of nonlinear correlation has been applied, which offer better correlation peaks than the conventional joint transform correlators. The proposed idea aims to achieve simultaneous encryption and authentication of multiple images and overcomes the constraints of storage issue.