Fig. 1

Principle of three-channel optical information encoding and encryption based on engineering the coherence Stokes vector of a partially coherent beam. a Schematic of encoding three-channel information \(S_1(\textbf{v})\), \(S_2(\textbf{v})\), and \(S_3(\textbf{v})\) into the coherence Stokes vector \(\textbf{S}(\textbf{r}_1, \textbf{r}_2) = [S_1(\textbf{r}_1, \textbf{r}_2), S_2(\textbf{r}_1, \textbf{r}_2), S_3(\textbf{r}_1, \textbf{r}_2)]\) of a partially coherent beam via the encoding system H. The three-channel information is decoded by the decoding system \(H^{-1}\). b Three-channel images encoding and decoding. c Color image encoding and decoding