A simple authentication-based optical security method

Abstract

Optical security has attracted much attention in recent years, and much research work has been done to establish various optical security systems. It has been further found that when optical authentication is introduced into optical encryption systems, system security can be enhanced. Hence, authentication-based optical security has been widely studied. However, much previous work needs to use relatively complicated optical setups or algorithms to establish authentication-based optical security systems. In this paper, a simple method is presented by using direct wave propagation to generate a compressed phase-only mask as ciphertext, and the input image is compressed before the encoding. Results and analyses demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and effective for authentication-based optical security. It is expected that the method presented can provide a promising approach for effectively enriching authentication-based optical security area.