Only briefly SBIR involved, in 1989, the firm was acquired by Du Pont electronic imaging group. Growing to a 30-person operation, under the leadership of a serial entrepeneur, Global Holonetics developed and sold the world's first commercial optical computer-- an optical Fourier Transform feature extractor or a first "Smart Camera" to include a optomechanical wedge-ring domain sampler, spinning through the Fourier plane, used a diode laser with a custom Spatial Light Modulator (SLM), coupled with a software artificial neural network HN back propagation classifier. Device could find defects in many manufactured consumable goods (TV dinners, hershey bars, labels, etc.) at up to 15 per second that humans cannot inspect. This system achieved for the first time for such production lines, true 100% inspection, and over 99.95% classification accuracy. At the time, this was 30:1 price performance ratio, at only $10,000 for a shoe box sized optical computer unit, equivalent in 1986 to a refrigerator-sized array processor costing over $300,000 then. Today, it is possible to perform the same process entirely in floating point software. The combination of Fourier Transform feature extraction and neural net classification is something we plan to use again for interactive media applications.
