A Content Hiding Method for Digital Hologram Using Multiple Fresnel Diffraction

A digital hologram (DH) is so highly valued that it needs to be protected from exposure to an unpermitted person, which could be done by a content encryption. We propose an encryption scheme for digital holograms, whose goal is to hide their information with maximal visual distortion and minimal ration of the encrypted data. It uses the characteristics of the Fresnel transform and signal processing techniques. As the diffraction distance increases the region containing the object information relative to the whole diffraction plane becomes smaller. Therefore our scheme diffracts a given digital hologram twice: the first transform for reconstructing the image contained by the hologram and the second transform for concentrating the energy of the object into a small region. Then only the energy-concentrated region is encrypted to reduce the amount of data to be encrypted. Experimental results show that when the diffraction distance of the second transform is about 20 m, the encryption ratio is only 0.0058% of the hologram data, which is enough to hide the object information unrecognizably.