The proposed work involves: new optical architectures, allows incorporation of new optical devices (bistable arrays, ferroelectric liquid crystals, etc.) being developed for other applications, and provides new algorithms and new applications. It addresses the problem of the fact that different optical systems architectures are required to implement different operations. The proposed work will emphasize iconic image processing (at the pixel level), feature and symbolic processing (low level features), processing of object parts (medium level features), and information processing of facts (high level data). This allows the parallelism, multi-processor and global interconnection capability of photonics to be used at all levels (pixel, feature, part, symbolic, and facts) of information/data processing. Such multi-functional flexibility is not commonly found in optical processors.
