Asymmetric optical image encryption with silhouette removal using interference and equal modulus decomposition

Abstract

We propose an asymmetric optical image encryption scheme with silhouette removal by using interference and equal modulus decomposition (EMD). Plaintext is first separated into two complex value masks with the same modulus using EMD in the Fresnel transform domain. The two masks are encoded into four phase-only masks (POMs), two of which are treated as ciphertexts and other two as plaintext-dependent private keys by using the inverse Fresnel transform with different diffraction distances and interference-based encryption. Any information about the plaintext, including its silhouette, cannot be retrieved using one, two, or even three of the four POMs. Our scheme also avoids the constraint of the same modulus in EMD and eliminates the vulnerability against the iterative amplitude-phase attack and advanced iterative amplitude-phase attack. Numerical simulations were used to verify the validity and security of our proposed method.