Ptychography is combined with optical image encryption for the first time. Due to the nature of ptychography, not only is the interferometric optical setup that is usually adopted not required any more, but also the encryption for a complex-valued image is achievable. Considering that the probes overlapping with each other is the crucial factor in ptychography, their complex-amplitude functions can serve as a kind of secret keys that lead to the enlarged key space and the enhanced system security. Further, since only introducing the probes into the input of common system is required, it is convenient to combine ptychography with many existing optical image encryption systems for varied security applications.

To avoid additive cross-talk among multiple images, they are separated from each other and even from the host image in the hiding and the extraction process by locating them independently in the Fresnel domain with computer-generated double phase-only masks. Gray images and white-ground and black-ground binary images can be hidden in the system at the same time. The hiding capacity of the system as to these three types of multiple image has also been investigated using a cascaded iterative algorithm. The security and the multiplexing parameters of the system are analyzed as well.

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We propose an optical hiding method based on visual cryptography. In the hiding process, we convert the secret information into a set of fabricated phase-keys, which are completely independent of each other, intensity-detected-proof and image-covered, leading to the high security. During the extraction process, the covered phase-keys are illuminated with laser beams and then incoherently superimposed to extract the hidden information directly by human vision, without complicated optical implementations and any additional computation, resulting in the convenience of extraction. Also, the phase-keys are manufactured as the diffractive optical elements that are robust to the attacks, such as the blocking and the phase-noise. Optical experiments verify that the high security, the easy extraction and the strong robustness are all obtainable in the visual-cryptography-based optical hiding.

In this study, we investigate the integration of compressive sensing (CS) and photon-counting imaging (PCI) techniques with a ptychography-based optical image encryption system. Primarily, the plaintext real-valued image is optically encrypted and recorded via a classical ptychography technique. Further, the sparse-based representations of the original encrypted complex data can be produced by combining CS and PCI techniques with the primary encrypted image. Such a combination takes an advantage of reduced encrypted samples (i.e., linearly projected random compressive complex samples and photon-counted complex samples) that can be exploited to realize optical decryption, which inherently serves as a secret key (i.e., independent to encryption phase keys) and makes an intruder attack futile. In addition to this, recording fewer encrypted samples provides a substantial bandwidth reduction in online transmission. We demonstrate that the fewer sparse-based complex samples have adequate information to realize decryption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on integrating CS and PCI with conventional ptychography-based optical image encryption.