Color image joint optical encryption with authentication

Optical encryption leverages the physical properties of light (including multi-dimensional light field information) to secure information, with high parallelism and processing capability, addressing the efficiency bottlenecks faced by electronic encryption in handling massive data. In traditional color image optical encryption, encrypting each monochromatic channel separately poses a security risk: due to high content similarity across channels, deciphering one channel readily reveals the others, severely compromising system security. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a color image optical encryption scheme that integrates spatial-spectral joint encoding with a randomized wheel mechanism. This approach enhances the randomness of the encrypted signal and introduces more information entropy, thus significantly improving the concealment and non-interpretability of the encrypted signal. Both simulations and experimental results validate the feasibility of the method and its excellent robustness against various types of attacks and noise interference. We believe this approach will pave a new avenue for optical encryption of color images.