Optical encryption with compressive ghost imaging

Abstract

Ghost imaging (GI) is a novel technique where the optical information of an object is encoded in the correlation of the intensity fluctuations of a light source. Computational GI (CGI) is a variant of the standard procedure that uses a single bucket detector. Recently, we proposed to use CGI to encrypt and transmit the object information to a remote party [1]. The optical encryption scheme shows compressibility and robustness to eavesdropping attacks. The reconstruction algorithm provides a relative low quality images and requires high acquisitions times. A procedure to overcome such limitations is to combine CGI with compressive sampling (CS), an advanced signal processing theory that exploits the redundancy in the structure of most usual images.