Hybrid optical-digital computers offer enormous potential for the future of numerically intensive computational problems as they are able to perform totally parallel computations at the speed of light. Optical computing is currently an extremely active area of research in the USA, Japan, Europe and China. Progress with optical to electronic interface technology has made previously impossible hybrid architectures feasible and numerous implementations have appeared in research laboratories around the world. This book focuses attention on the development of optically implementable frequency domain algorithms that may be exploited to enhance the performance of optical information processing systems. The objective of filtering is to overcome limitations in performance that are generated by problems relating to input image distortion, noise, clutter, discrimination, object localization, accuracy, multi-class recognition, and optical efficiency. The methods and architectures reported should be of interest to researchers and industrial companies building systems for industrial inspection, security and surveillance, and military target acquistion and tracking.
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