With present electronic equipment it is difficult to perform the temporal analysis of optical signals in the picosecond range. One usually resorts to sampling techniques that do not apply to single-event signals. Pattern recognition is an alternative way to perform signal analysis. This technique is well known in the context of the spatial analysis of two-dimension scenes. It relies on the comparison of an input object with a series of filter patterns, that have been stored in a bank. It is restricted to the recognition of one pattern among those that are contained in the bank but it applies to single events and it can be very fast since it relies on the cross correlation processing capabilities of non-linear optical materials. We adapt this procedure to the temporal domain.

Date Published: 22 May 1998
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 3490, Optics in Computing '98, (22 May 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.308881

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3490:
Optics in Computing '98
Pierre H. Chavel; David A. B. Miller; Hugo Thienpont, Editor(s)