Review on optical image hiding and watermarking techniques

Abstract Information security is a critical issue in modern society and image watermarking can effectively prevent unauthorized information access. Optical image watermarking techniques generally have advantages of parallel high-speed processing and multi-dimensional capabilities compared to digital approaches. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the research works related to optical image hiding and watermarking techniques conducted in the past decade. The past research works have focused on two major aspects: various optical systems for image hiding, and the methods for embedding the optical system output into a host image. A summary of the state-of-the-art works is made from these two perspectives.