Volumetric Light-field Encryption at the Microscopic Scale
📝 Abstract
We report a light-field based method that allows the optical encryption of three-dimensional (3D) volumetric information at the microscopic scale in a single 2D light-field image. The system consists of a microlens array and an array of random phase/amplitude masks. The method utilizes a wave optics model to account for the dominant diffraction effect at this new scale, and the system point-spread function (PSF) serves as the key for encryption and decryption. We successfully developed and demonstrated a deconvolution algorithm to retrieve spatially multiplexed discrete and continuous volumetric data from 2D light-field images. Showing that the method is practical for data transmission and storage, we obtained a faithful reconstruction of the 3D volumetric information from a digital copy of the encrypted light-field image. The method represents a new level of optical encryption, paving the way for broad industrial and biomedical applications in processing and securing 3D data at the microscopic scale.
💡 Analysis
We report a light-field based method that allows the optical encryption of three-dimensional (3D) volumetric information at the microscopic scale in a single 2D light-field image. The system consists of a microlens array and an array of random phase/amplitude masks. The method utilizes a wave optics model to account for the dominant diffraction effect at this new scale, and the system point-spread function (PSF) serves as the key for encryption and decryption. We successfully developed and demonstrated a deconvolution algorithm to retrieve spatially multiplexed discrete and continuous volumetric data from 2D light-field images. Showing that the method is practical for data transmission and storage, we obtained a faithful reconstruction of the 3D volumetric information from a digital copy of the encrypted light-field image. The method represents a new level of optical encryption, paving the way for broad industrial and biomedical applications in processing and securing 3D data at the microscopic scale.
📄 Content
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Volumetric Light-field Encryption at the Microscopic Scale Haoyu Li1,+, Changliang Guo1,2,+, Inbarasan Muniraj2, Bryce C. Schroeder1,3, John T. Sheridan2 and Shu Jia1,3,*
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA. 2School of Electrical, Electronic Engineering, IoE2 Lab, The SFI-Strategic Research Cluster in Solar Energy Conversion, College of Engineering and Architecture, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. 3Medical Scientist Training Program, Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA. *s.jia@stonybrook.edu +These authors contributed equally to this work.
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ABSTRACT We report a light-field based method that allows the optical encryption of three-dimensional (3D) volumetric information at the microscopic scale in a single 2D light-field image. The system consists of a microlens array and an array of random phase/amplitude masks. The method utilizes a wave optics model to account for the dominant diffraction effect at this new scale, and the system point-spread function (PSF) serves as the key for encryption and decryption. We successfully developed and demonstrated a deconvolution algorithm to retrieve both spatially multiplexed discrete data and continuous volumetric data from 2D light- field images. Showing that the method is practical for data transmission and storage, we obtained a faithful reconstruction of the 3D volumetric information from a digital copy of the encrypted light-field image. The method represents a new level of optical encryption, paving the way for broad industrial and biomedical applications in processing and securing 3D data at the microscopic scale.
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INTRODUCTION The ever-increasing amount of information that individuals and organizations are storing, processing and analyzing drives the demand for information security technologies. Various such techniques, including steganography, cryptography and digital watermarking, have been used to enhance the security and privacy of data1–3. Since the inception of double random phase encoding (DRPE)4, optical technologies have demonstrated remarkable advantages compared to other encryption methodologies. These advantages include parallel processing, system flexibility, multi-dimensional capabilities, and high encryption density with optical signal processing5–7. The rapid development of optical cryptosystems takes advantage of the many degrees of freedom available with both real and phase-space optical parameters, such as amplitude, polarization, wavelength, and phase8–13. Several optical encryption techniques employing variations of the classical Fourier transform based DRPE system have been further developed, including Fresnel transform (FST), Fractional Fourier transform (FRT), Hartley Transform (HT), Gyrator Transform (GT), and Linear Canonical Transform (LCT)14–19. The quantum nature of light has also been explored as a security key in quantum communications20,21.
Recently, various approaches have been reported for the optical encryption of 3D objects at the macroscopic scale (millimeters, centimeters to meters)22–31. However, the existing methods are ineffective at the microscopic scale, despite the ever-growing demand in this regime. This challenge is mainly caused by two factors. First, in macroscopic scenes, the light-field information can be effectively analyzed using geometrical optics, but because diffraction now plays a crucial role, a wave optics model must be considered in the recording and processing of the data at the microscopic level. Second, in macroscopic scenes, optical encryption is primarily restricted to the diffusely reflecting surface of objects due to scattering, which, however, no longer dominates at the microscopic level, leading to most objects being transparent. These factors demand distinct image formation, encryption and processing 4
algorithms for the largely unexplored microscopic scale. An encryption method to address these challenges is highly desired and expected to lay the foundation for many new applications.
Here we report volumetric light-field encryption, a method that allows 3D data at the microscopic scale to be processed and secured as a single 2D image, which can be used to faithfully reconstruct the volumetric information. The method is based on developments in light-field imaging, which utilizes microlens arrays to simultaneously capture both the spatial and angular information of light, allowing the computational synthesis of 3D focal stacks across the entire volume of a 3D object. In the early demonstrations of light-field imaging systems, the use of ray-optics models for reconstruction inevitably compromised the lateral and angular (i.e. axial) resolution32–35. Recently, wave-optics models have been developed for light-field reconstruction, which m
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