In general, a decision on any event is made through a sequence of bifurcating selection process. In addition to numerical computation, the binary logic operations of digital electronics may well be used to describe any complicated decision making procedure. In this paper, we show that the single-input-double-output bifurcating principle may be applied to optical information processing. In particular, the massive parallelism and inherent inaccuracy of optics offer a unique representation of human thinking and decision making process. Coherent optical experiments including pattern recognition and dynamic range compression via photorefractive crystals are used to demonstrate the principle of bifurcating optical information processing.

Date Published: 30 October 1992
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 1812, Optical Computing and Neural Networks, (30 October 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.131192

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1812:
Optical Computing and Neural Networks
Ken Yuh Hsu; Hua-Kuang Liu, Editor(s)