High-speed image matching with coaxial holographic optical correlator

Abstract

A computation speed of more than 100 Gbps is experimentally demonstrated using our developed ultrahigh-speed optical correlator. To verify this high computation speed practically, the computation speeds of our optical correlator and conventional digital image matching are quantitatively compared. We use a population count function that achieves the fastest calculation speed when calculating binary matching by a central processing unit (CPU). The calculation speed of the optical correlator is dramatically faster than that using a CPU (2.40 GHz × 4) and 16 GB of random access memory, especially when the calculation data are large-scale.