Transmission of hidden images within noise

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Johnson, Steven and McMillan, Alex and Frick, Stefan and Rarity, John and Padgett, Miles (2024) Transmission of hidden images within noise. Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, 12912. 129120U. ISSN 0277-786X (https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3000546)

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Abstract

The secure transmission of an image can be accomplished by encoding the image information, securely communicating this information, and subsequently reconstructing the image. As an alternative, here we show how the image itself can be directly transmitted while ensuring that the presence of any cavesdropper is revealed in a way akin to quantum key distribution. We achieve this transmission using a photon-pair source with the deliberate addition of a thermal light source as background noise. One photon of the pair illuminates the object, which is masked from an eavesdropper by adding indistinguishable thermal photons, the other photon of the pair acts as a time reference from which the intended recipient can preferentially detect the image carrying photons. These reference photons are themselves made sensitive to the presence of an eavesdropper by traditional polarisation-based QKD encoding. Interestingly the security encoding is performed in the two-dimensional polarisation-basis, but the image information is encoded in a much higher-dimensional, hence information-rich, pixel basis. In our example implementation, our images have more than 100 independent pixels. Beyond the secure transmission of images, our approach to the distribution of secure high-dimensional information may create new high-bandwidth approaches to traditional QKD.

ORCID iDs

Johnson, Steven ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6181-8303, McMillan, Alex, Frick, Stefan, Rarity, John and Padgett, Miles;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:89795
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    13 March 2024
    Published
    1 January 2024
    Accepted
    Subjects:Science > Physics
    Department:Faculty of Science > Physics
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:01 Jul 2024 14:57
    Last modified:12 Dec 2024 15:33
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/89795
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