Optical information authentication using optical encryption and sparsity constraint

Abstract Recent advances indicate that optical encryption can be used not only for signal secrecy but also for information authentication. By integrating optical encryption with a sparsity constraint, the recovered image of the decoder is always visually unrecognizable, whereas it can be authenticated by optical correlation means. Such a design can provide an additional security layer for conventional optical encryption techniques, since the authentication is carried out without information leakage of the primary signal. Advances of optical authentication are reviewed in this paper, theoretical principles as well as implementation examples are included to illustrate the performance of representative authentication systems. Contrastive analyses and future perspectives are also discussed, and it is expected that this review work can be beneficial to the development of optical security area.