<title>Dual template optical correlator for pattern recognition</title>

Abstract

A new coherent optical correlator system has been developed for intended application to breast cancer screening. Such a system must have an inherent capability to deal with patterns that have high degrees of similarity between the desired and rejected classes, due to the overall similarity between benign and malignant cells. Consequently, effort has been directed toward achieving this goal. This paper presents an optical configuration that contains two coherent optical processors (COPs) working in parallel and utilizes phase-stepping detection at the output to multiply the two correlation signals. It is shown how this scheme offers an excellent compromise between good discrimination and immunity from noise added in the input plane