Optical ghost cryptography and steganography

As an indirect imaging technique, computational ghost imaging (GI) obtains the object information by calculating the intensity correlation between a series of computer-generated matrices and the corresponding bucket signals, which thereby offers a potential application in optical encryption. Here, we propose a new steganography scheme, called ghost steganography, based on the principle of computational GI. In our ghost steganography scheme, the bucket intensity signals of a secret image are concealed into the ones of a non-secret image by applying a non-conspicuous number integration process. To further increase the security, we introduce RSA cryptography to encode the integrated bucket signals after the steganography process. Simulation and experiment results fully demonstrate the feasibility of our optical ghost cryptography and steganography scheme. Our work paves a way to the application of GI in steganography and also enriches the knowledge of symmetric and asymmetric optical cryptography. @ Elsevier, 2020.