Transmission of hidden images within noise

Steven Johnson; Alex McMillan; Stefan Frick; John Rarity; Miles Padgett

doi:10.1117/12.3000546

13 March 2024 Transmission of hidden images within noise

Steven Johnson, Alex McMillan, Stefan Frick, John Rarity, Miles Padgett

Proceedings Volume 12912, Quantum Sensing, Imaging, and Precision Metrology II; 129120U (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3000546
Event: SPIE Quantum West, 2024, San Francisco, California, United States

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 eavesdropper 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 polarization-based QKD encoding. Interestingly, the security encoding is performed in the two-dimensional polarization-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.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Steven Johnson, Alex McMillan, Stefan Frick, John Rarity, and Miles Padgett "Transmission of hidden images within noise", Proc. SPIE 12912, Quantum Sensing, Imaging, and Precision Metrology II, 129120U (13 March 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3000546

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