Remote transport of confidential images based on coherence weight of light

Once dismissed as a drawback in optical processing, low coherence of light is now gaining renewed attention, as recent studies reveal that harnessing optical coherence can unlock enhanced capabilities in information processing. Despite ongoing efforts, a persistent challenge remains: the coherence of light degrades significantly under beam propagation, causing information loss and limiting the feasibility of secure remote transmission. This work presents a coherence-weight-based scheme for remote image transport where the confidential image is encoded into the coherence weights of a partially coherent beam whose statistical structure is preserved during free-space propagation. At the receiver, the original image is successfully reconstructed from the characteristic function—cross-spectral density function of the transmitted beam. Furthermore, the image remote transport scheme demonstrates strong robustness against the opaque obstacles during transmission, with experimental results showing high fidelity and a similarity index exceeding 90%. Exploiting the coherence weight of light as an advanced tool for target information manipulation broadens its applications and opens new avenues in high-security optical communication, holography, and image-based computing.