Abstract

The majority of contemporary optical encryption techniques use coherent illumination and suffer from speckle-noise pollution, which severely limits their applicability even when information encoded into special “containers” such as a QR code. Spatially incoherent encryption does not have this drawback, but it suffers from reduced encryption strength due to formation of an unobscured image right on top of the encrypted one by undiffracted light from the encoding diffraction optical element (DOE) in axial configuration. We present a new lensless encryption scheme, experimentally implemented with two liquid crystal spatial light modulators, that does not have this disadvantage because of a special encoding DOE design, which forms desired light distribution in the photosensor plane under spherically diverging illumination without a converging lens. Results of optical experiments on encryption of QR codes and successful information retrieval from decoded images are presented. Conducted analysis of encryption strength demonstrates sufficiently high key sensitivity and large enough key space to resist any brute force attacks.

© 2021 Optical Society of America

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