Abstract

Although analog optical computing offered a substantial performance advantage when originally developed in the 1960s for special purpose applications such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging and correlation based pattern recognition, and in the 1970s for acoustooptic spectrum analyzers and correlators, the unstoppable juggernauts of microelectronics and digital signal processing has now essentially caught up and surpassed the computational performance required for these applications.

© 2001 Optical Society of America