<title>Overview of optical pattern recognition: progress and recent advances</title>

Abstract

This article addresses the development and progress in the rapidly growing area of optical pattern recognition. In optical pattern recognition there are two basic approaches; namely, matched filtering and associative memories. The first employs optical correlators and the later uses neural networks. This paper reviews various types of optical correlators and neural networks as applied to real-time optical pattern recognition for which some of the recent advances are included.