Applications Of Photorefractive Crystals To Optical Signal Processing

The photorefractive effect in nonlinear crystals can be utilized to perform such elementary optical computing operations as image amplification, 2D optical logic, phase conjugation, spatial correlation and convolutions. The potential applications of these elementary optical computing operations to analog optical computing (e.g., matrix inversion, solving matrix eigenvector/eigenvalue problems), digital optical processing, pattern recognition and image processing are described.