摘要 |
The invention relates to encoding phase information in micro-grating-based anti-counterfeit devices such as diffractive optically variable identification devices (DOVID). The invention utilizes that alignment of grating line positions in different micro-gratings having common line spacing and orientation, can be used as a new, additional information channel in DOVIDs. By displacing grating line positions in different pixels relative to a common reference grating, relative shifts in alignment are introduced that do not affect the visual effects encoded in the DOVID. The relative shifts in line position alignment induce relative shifts in the phase of light diffracted by the DOVID, so as to introduce a spatial phase shift distribution corresponding to the distribution of position shifts over the DOVID. Such spatial phase shift distribution is not visible, and the phase encoded information is thereby invisible unless a reader based on e.g. generalized phase contrast is applied. The phase encoded information can further be phase encrypted so that a spatial phase modulator decryption key is required to read the encoded information. |