The role of optics and photonics in encryption, anti-counterfeiting, and security systems (Parts I and II)

In this paper, we discuss the role of optics and photonics systems in developing reliable techniques for anti-counterfeiting, verification, and security systems. The techniques presented in this paper can be used in a variety of applications including security verification of credit cards, passports, and other IDs so that they cannot easily be reproduced. We also discuss optical techniques for image encryption, optical neural networks for face recognition, and other biometrics signature verification using optics and optoelectronics. We present new techniques that employ complex phase/amplitude encoding that cannot be seen and cannot be copied by an intensity sensitive detector such as a CCD camera.