Optical image encryption via photon-counting imaging and compressive sensing based ptychography

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.