Optical Computing With Variable Grating Mode Liquid Crystal Devices

A liquid crystal device that performs a two-dimensional intensity-to-spatial frequency conversion has been developed for use as an optical transducer. When such a device is used as the input transducer in an optical filtering arrangement, image intensity levels can be easily manipulated via Fourier plane filters. This variable input intensity-output intensity transfer function has numerous potential applications in image processing. Implementation of a variable level slice operation is discussed and experimental results presented. The VGM LCLV device is also particularly well adapted to performing binary logic operations on 2-D images. This application is discussed, and results demonstrating the implementation of common logic operations are presented.