Optical color-image encryption in the diffractive-imaging scheme

•we propose a new color image encryption method by use of theta-modulation.•The proposal can optically encrypt a color image into a single intensity pattern.•The proposal has huge key space and is robust against brute force attack.

By introducing the theta modulation technique into the diffractive-imaging-based optical scheme, we propose a novel approach for color image encryption. For encryption, a color image is divided into three channels, i.e., red, green and blue, and thereafter these components are appended by redundant data before being sent to the encryption scheme. The carefully designed optical setup, which comprises of three 4f optical architectures and a diffractive-imaging-based optical scheme, could encode the three plaintexts into a single noise-like intensity pattern. For the decryption, an iterative phase retrieval algorithm, together with a filter operation, is applied to extract the primary color images from the diffraction intensity map. Compared with previous methods, our proposal has successfully encrypted a color rather than grayscale image into a single intensity pattern, as a result of which the capacity and practicability have been remarkably enhanced. In addition, the performance and the security of it are also investigated. The validity as well as feasibility of the proposed method is supported by numerical simulations.