Flexible optical encryption with multiple users and multiple security levels

We present a basic optical encryption architecture that admits several cryptography applications based on multiplexing. Users can decrypt different private images from the same encrypted image, a superuser can have a key that decrypts all encrypted images, and multiplexed images can be encrypted with different levels of security. This system is presented in the context of a general framework of optical encryption application development. We illustrate with a real-world three-dimensional scene, captured with digital holography, and encrypted using the fractional Fourier transform, where different users have access to different three-dimensional objects in the scene.