Ghost-secured imaging via pixel modulation of one phase-only mask

It is well known that in ghost imaging, a large number of random phase-only masks should be applied for generating a series of reference intensity patterns. Hence, it is always concerned that data storage or transmission might be tedious in some applications. In this paper, we report how only one random phaseonly mask should be pre-generated to be stored or transmitted for ghost-imaging-based optical encryption system with sufficiently guaranteed security. During optical encoding, a method, called pixel modulation, is developed and applied to sequentially modulate this random phase-only mask. Since pixel modulation strategy possesses high invisibility and randomness, high security is guaranteed in the proposed optical system. In addition, only one random phase-only mask and sparsely binary maps are stored or transmitted as principal keys for the decoding, hence potential problem in conventional optical security systems is effectively mitigated.