Computational ghost imaging with key-patterns for image encryption

Here, we propose an encryption scheme by computational ghost imaging (CGI), and the transmitting data have been hidden in the illumination patterns. The sender uses a set of key-patterns (KPs) from the KPs database to hide the data in the illumination patterns. It only needs to transfer a key vector which record the KPs labels (sequence positions in KPs database) in a private channel. The receiver gets this key vector from the private channel, and gets the KPs. So, the receiver can decrypt the patterns acquired from the public channel, which can recover the image with the aids of bucket detector values from public channel. Although the eavesdropper can obtain all the data in public channel, they cannot decrypt the information because the second-order correlation algorithm needs the correct patterns. In our scheme, encrypted transmission is very secure, convenient and fast, which is important and significant for real implications of CGI encryption.