Optical image encryption with silhouette removal based on interference and phase blend processing

To completely eliminate the silhouette problem that inherently exists in the earlier interference-based encryption scheme with two phase-only masks (POMs), we propose a simple new encryption method based on optical interference of one random POM and two analytically obtained POMs. Different from the previous methods which require time-consuming iterative computation or postprocessing of the POMs for silhouette removal, our method can resolve the problem during the production of the POMs based on interference principle. Information associated with the original image is smoothed away by modulation of the random POM. Illegal deciphers cannot retrieve the primitive image using only one or two of the POMs. Incorporated with the linear phase blend operation, our method can provide higher robustness against brute force attacks. Simulation results are presented to support the validity and feasibility of our method.