Optical authentication technique based on interference image hiding system and phase-only correlation

An optical authentication technique based on interference image hiding system and phase-only correlation is proposed. In this method, some predefined complex images with different amplitudes and the same phase are respectively encoded into two phase-only masks according to the interference principle. This technique can easily generate different verification keys for different users, so it brings convenience for multi-user application. In the verification stage, both a sharp correlation peak and a significant image represented the identity of a user are generated simultaneously. Therefore, in addition to simple verification, this method can also recognize the identity of the user. Moreover, this technique can effectively avoid the verification key being forged by other person. All the performances and the feasibility of our proposed method are tested by numerical simulations.