Experimental scrambling and noise reduction applied to the optical encryption of QR codes

In this contribution, we implement two techniques to reinforce optical encryption, which we restrict in particular to the QR codes, but could be applied in a general encoding situation. To our knowledge, we present the first experimental-positional optical scrambling merged with an optical encryption procedure. The inclusion of an experimental scrambling technique in an optical encryption protocol, in particular dealing with a QR code "container", adds more protection to the encoding proposal. Additionally, a nonlinear normalization technique is applied to reduce the noise over the recovered images besides increasing the security against attacks. The opto-digital techniques employ an interferometric arrangement and a joint transform correlator encrypting architecture. The experimental results demonstrate the capability of the methods to accomplish the task. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America