Code retrieval via undercover multiplexing

The purpose of this research is to develop an undercover multiplexing technique to give additional protection for optical information encryption. We employ the double random phase mask as our basic optical encryption system. The holographic storage medium of choice is a photorefractive crystal. To achieve the multiplexing we use the aperture size of the pupil in the optical system, as it governs the speckle size. We introduce such variation in order to produce a decorrelation between two consecutively stored speckle patterns. Each stored speckle pattern is associated to an input encrypted image, thus producing a multiplexing of the encrypted information. We implement this operation without altering the setup architecture and the random phase masks. This multiplexing is our undercover operation to encipher a true code behind a fake code. Under this approach, the user can only recover the bulk information stored in the volume hologram. However, he cannot recover the true code without the additional information on the pupil size key, even if accessed in position of the original decoding mask. (C) 2006 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.