Photon-counting double-random-phase encoding for secure image verification and retrieval

• Published in: Journal of optics (2010) Vol. 14; no. 9; pp. 94001 - 1-11
• Main Authors: Pérez-Cabré, Elisabet, Abril, Héctor C, Millán, María S, Javidi, Bahram
• Format: Journal Article Publication
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.09.2012; Institute of Physics (IOP)
• Subjects: Authentication; Ciències de la visió; Compressing; Constraining; Correlació (Estadística); Correlators; Data encryption (Computer science); Detectors òptics; Encriptació de dades (Informàtica); encryption; Enginyeria de la telecomunicació; Fotons; image retrieval; Imaging; information verification; Information visualization; nonlinear correlation; optical security; Photon detectors; photon-counting imaging; Photons; Processament del senyal; Retrieval; Robustness; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC; Òptica física
• ISSN: 2040-8978; 2040-8986
• DOI: 10.1088/2040-8978/14/9/094001

The integration of photon-counting imaging techniques and optical encryption systems can improve information authentication robustness against intruder attacks. Photon-counting imaging generates distributions with far fewer photons than conventional imaging and provides substantial bandwidth reduction by generating sparse encrypted data. We show that photon-limited encrypted distributions have sufficient information for successful decryption, authentication and signal retrieval. Additional compression of the encrypted distribution is applied by limiting the number of phase values used to reproduce the phase information of the complex-valued encrypted data. The validity of this technique-with and without phase compression-is probed through simulated experiments for two types of input images: alphanumerical signs and dithered natural scenes.