Digital holography provides a method of the 3-D recording and numerical reconstruction by a simple optical system and a computer. Quantitative measurement and numerical refocusing are major characteristics. So far, many physical parameters such as amplitude, phase, polarization, fluorescence, and spectra can be obtained independently. Recently, multimodal imaging that can obtain simultaneously two or more physical parameters by combining digital holographic microscope and other optical microscopes such as a fluorescence optical microscope and a Raman scattering microscope has emerged. In this review, physical parametric imaging techniques based on digital holography are presented and then these techniques are enhanced to develop multimodal imaging based on digital holography.

This paper presents an overview of the potential of free space optical technology in information security, encryption, and authentication. Optical waveform posses many degrees of freedom such as amplitude, phase, polarization, spectral content, and multiplexing which can be combined in different ways to make the information encoding more secure. This paper reviews optical techniques for encryption and security of two-dimensional and three-dimensional data. Interferometric methods are used to record and retrieve data by either optical or digital holography for security applications. Digital holograms are widely used in recording and processing three dimensional data, and are attractive for securing three dimensional data. Also, we review optical authentication techniques applied to ID tags with visible and near infrared imaging. A variety of images and signatures, including biometrics, random codes, and primary images can be combined in an optical ID tag for security and authentication.