SBIR-STTR Award

We propose to build a hybrid electrical-optical resonator which retains the large number of independent reference objects of the all-optical systems, but scale to much higher speeds, and performs shift-invariant recognition. The large number of independent references are stored in volume hologram as angualry multiplexed holograms. Shift invariance is accomplished by using these reference image as one of the inputs to a correlator, the other input being the image to be recognized. Speed is obtained by restricting the dynamic variable to power levels whose temporal change is influenced only by electrical and acoustooptic time constants and not by photorefractive or spatial light modulator time constants. This allows the system to perform classification of the microsecond time scale rather than the millisecond scale required of the all-optical approach.