Optical information encryption using general temporal ghost imaging with practical experimental condition

TL;DR

This paper experimentally validates a theoretical model for temporal ghost imaging, demonstrating its potential for optical information encryption and highlighting the importance of detector parameters for decoding accuracy in noisy environments.

Contribution

The study provides the first experimental verification of a theoretical model for TGI under practical conditions and explores its application in encrypting multi-bit information.

Findings

Decoding accuracy is highly sensitive to detector parameters as coding density increases.

The system is robust against detection noise up to a certain threshold.

Experimental results confirm the theoretical model's predictions for practical TGI applications.

Abstract

Temporal Ghost Imaging (TGI), which reconstructs fast temporal signals using a slow detector, holds significant potential in optical communication, high-speed imaging, and quantum information processing. However, achieving high-quality information reconstruction has been a major challenge for the practical application of TGI. A theoretical model [\emph{ Applied Optics}, 62(5): 1175-1182 (2023)] was proposed to investigate the influence of experimental parameters of the slow detector on image quality; however, its experimental verification was hitherto lacking. In this study, we implemented a multi-bit information transmission scheme based on both quantum and classical TGI methods. Experimental validation confirmed the accuracy of the theoretical model and demonstrated its application in encrypting noisy multi-bit information. The experimental results demonstrate that as the information coding density increases, the decoding accuracy becomes highly sensitive to the detection accuracy and threshold of the slow detector. When these parameters degrade, the decoding quality deteriorates significantly. Additionally, our system shows notable robustness against detection noise, but loses the ability to accurately decode when the noise amplitude becomes too high. Our work endows TGI with optical information encryption capabilities in practical systems and furnishes comprehensive guidelines for the further application of TGI.