A method for secure real-time image transmission based on optical encryption

Image encryption is distinct from text encryption. This difference can be attributed to the fact that an image consists of a large amount of data, thereby resulting in low efficiency of real-time image encryption. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for secure real-time image transmission. A method for image encryption is applied using optical computing technologies which inherently deal with images and massive amounts of data in parallel, so that we can attain the purpose of high speed. The method is implemented by stream cipher through polarization-encoding which functioned as optical logic gates. An experiment scheme optical system has been set up, and the results verify and prove that the encryption method is highly secure for image encryption. We also investigate security analysis with histogram.