Compact Holographic Memory for Optical Correlations

We propose to build a compact holographic memory with a capacity of 5000 holograms. The proposed system will be built with components that are commercially available and/or are based on well developed technologies. We will focus on technical issues in packaging and integration of the system to achieve low error rate and good environmental stability. The entire memory can be readout in 1 second, giving an equivalent data rate of 1.5GBytes/sec. When used as a correlator, this holographic device can correlate an input image with all 5000 stored images in optical form at a rate of 5000 images/sec. The readout images can be interfaced to other optical processors directly. In both modes of operation, the system can be reprogrammed by the user. We expect such a holographic memory system will be particularly useful in applications including military automatic target recognition, security locks, and robotic vision. Benefits: If successful, the project will make it possible to use the powerful optical correlations in environments previously unsuitable. This will open new application for holographic memory in image recognition and machine vision.