Unveiling the self-healing potential of Bessel–Gauss beams in image encryption

Over the past 30 years, Bessel beams have captivated researchers due to their remarkable properties, <i>viz.</i>, diffraction-free and self-healing intensity distribution and the associated orbital angular momentum owing to the helical wavefront. These special characteristics have motivated us in developing an optical cryptosystem that leverages their unique features. Therefore, this study demonstrates an image encryption scheme through the utilization of a spatially concatenated array of Bessel beams enabling high-dimensional encoding. The study explores the robustness of the scheme by intentionally obstructing the plaintext information. Thanks to the self-reconstruction of Bessel beams, the obstructed data can still be retrieved, demonstrating the scheme's resilience in adverse conditions.