Security enhancement of color image cryptosystem by optical interference principle and spiral phase encoding.

A color information cryptosystem based on optical interference principle and spiral phase encoding is proposed. A spiral phase mask (SPM) is used instead of a conventional random phase mask because it contains multiple storing keys in a single phase mask. The color image is decomposed into RGB channels. The decomposed three RGB channels can avoid the interference of crosstalks efficiently. Each channel is encoded into an SPM and analytically generates two spiral phase-only masks (SPOMs). The two SPOMs are then phase-truncated to get two encrypted images and amplitude-truncated to produce two asymmetric phase keys. The two SPOMs and the two asymmetric phase keys can be allocated to four different authorized users. The order, the wavelength, the focal length, and the radius are construction parameters of the SPM (or third SPOM) that can also be assigned to the four other different authorized users. The proposed technique can be used for a highly secure verification system, so an unauthorized user cannot retrieve the original image if only one key out of eight keys is missing. The proposed method does not require iterative encoding or postprocessing of SPOMs to overcome inherent silhouette problems, and its optical setup alleviates stringent alignment of SOPMs. The validity and feasibility of the proposed method are supported by numerical simulation results.