Optical Steganography via Programmable Anchoring Boundary of Soft Materials

Abstract Engineering the properties of light with multi‐channel planar elements can produce independent spectral response, and has formed the solid basis for image steganography techniques, which holds great promise for applications including information storage, optical encryption, and anti‐counterfeiting. However, most of the recently reported steganography systems suffer from limited size, sophisticated fabrication, and finite degree of freedom in encoding and decoding process. Herein, a versatile image steganography system based on soft material is proposed. The polarization and intensity of transmitted light are modulated by programing the anchoring boundary of liquid crystals, allowing arbitrary independent images multiplexing in single‐size element with high fidelity. Specifically, the stimuli‐responsiveness of liquid crystals endows the platform with a new degree of freedom to manipulate the transmitted spectrum dynamically, further sketching a prospective framework toward a new type of steganography with fascinating tunability. The proposed strategy sheds new light on multifarious display system by harnessing the stimuli‐responsiveness of soft materials, leading to promising applications in information storing, image steganography, anti‐counterfeiting, and multilevel encryption techniques.