Multichannel Programmable Acousto-Optic Correlator

This paper describes a programmable acousto-optic processor that uses bipolar joint transform correlation for signal detection. The performance of the bipolar joint transform-based acousto-optic corre-lator is compared to that of the classical joint transform-based acousto-optic correlator in the areas of light efficiency, correlation peak to sidelobe ratio, auto-correlation bandwidth, and cross-correlation sensitivity.