The Theory and experimental results of a simple optical correlator are given. The optical components consist only of an incoherent source, condensing, collimating, and transforming lenses, and a photodetector. For real-time operation, a reference signal on a photographic transparency is correlated with an unknown signal on an ultrasonic light modulator. The output is a function of time proportional to the correlation function's amplitude rather than the squared amplitude generated by other optical correlators. When used for correlation in radar signal processing, the optical processor may be used for both pulse coding and decoding (pulse expansion and compression) and the decoded signal is shown to be described by Woodward's ambiguity function. The experimental results demonstrated the validity of the theory in both real and scaled time. However, developmental work is still required to improve the operation.


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    Title :

    A Simple Real-Time Incoherent Optical Correlator


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    1967-11-01


    Size :

    3600488 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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