Abstract: The object of the invention is a phase modulator system comprising a beam splitter and a reflection mode phase modulator suitable for modulating linearly polarised light of at least one specific polarisation state while maintaining said polarisation state. The beam splitter and the phase modulator are arranged along an optical path of a light beam. The beam splitter is a polarisation beam splitter and the phase modulator system further comprises an optical rotator being arranged along the optical path between the polarisation beam splitter and the phase modulator, and rotating the polarisation state of the light beam by 45° in a given sense, wherein the polarisation state of the light beam incident upon the phase modulator corresponds to said specific polarisation state.

Abstract: The present invention relates generally to a method for parallel optical decoding of a digital phase image to an intensity image by algorithmic encoding of a data page into phase image and parallel optical decoding by capturing the interference of the phase data page and its copy shifted by one or a few pixels with respect to each other.