Abstract In this work, the occlusion and noise test on the encrypted image produced by a joint transform correlator-based encryption system in the Fresnel domain (FrD) are computed and presented, in order to check the performance of this security system with respect to the image quality resulting in the decryption process for the retrieved image. The encryption system based on a joint transform correlator (JTC) in the FrD was proposed by us, with the purpose of using a lensless optical setup. We test the performance of this security system when the encrypted image is affected by common sources of degradation such as noise (additive and multiplicative) or partial occlusion. Finally, we evaluate the performance and robustness of the security system in the FrD by using the metric of the root mean square error (RMSE) between the image to encrypt and the decrypted image when the encrypted image is degraded by noise or modified by occlusion.