Scattering-medium-based optical image encryption by chaos and digital optical phase conjugation

Scattering-medium-based optical image encryption provides an intrinsically tamper-resistant physical key. In this paper, we utilize a scattering medium with ideal optical properties as the physical key. The plaintext is transformed into four noise-like holograms with the help of the four-step phase-shifting digital holography. Low-frequency components of the four holograms are extracted and combined into a new image by the lifting wavelet transform (LWT). Then the combined image is scrambled by the nonlinear 3D chaos-based cyclic shift. In decryption, the digital optical phase conjugation (DOPC) technique is utilized to extract plaintext. Numerical simulations prove the feasibility of the proposed method, and the security analysis shows that our method can resist different attacks.