Opt. Express 21, 5373–5378 (2013)

Credit: © OSA 2013

Quick response codes, which are compact two-dimensional square barcodes that can be read by smartphones and tablet computers, have been growing in popularity in recent years and are now commonly found in many forms of consumer advertising and packaging. Now, a team of scientists from South America has considered the application of such codes for the transmission of encrypted information. The idea is to encrypt quick response codes instead of the corresponding raw information as their binary nature could prove far more resilient to speckle noise, thus resulting in higher quality information retrieval after decryption. Encryption tests with double random phase encoding, where two random phase masks are used to encrypt and decrypt the quick response codes, indicate that this is indeed the case. The researchers from the Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia and the Universidad Nacional de la Plata in Argentina are now investigating the use of multiplexing and synchronization to transfer movies by this method.