Hiding an image in cascaded Fresnel digital holograms

A system of two separated computer-generated holograms termed cascaded Fresnel digital holography (CFDH) is proposed and its application to hiding information is demonstrated by a computer simulation experiment. The technique is that the reconstructed image is the result of the wave Fresnel diffraction of two sub-holograms located at different distances from the imaging plane along the illuminating beam. The two sub-holograms are generated by an iterative algorithm based on the projection onto convex sets. In the application to the hiding of optical information, the information to be hidden is encoded into the sub-hologram which is multiplied by the host image in the input plane, the other sub-hologram in the filter plane is used for the deciphering key, the hidden image can be reconstructed in the imaging plane of the CFDH setup.