<title>Optical correlators: systems and domains of applications</title>

Abstract

The paper presents the basic concepts of the optical correlators. In our knowledge, it is the first systematic presentation of the applications of optical correlators. The main three types of optical correlators: the optical correlator in incoherent light, the optical correlator in coherent light (VanderLugt) and the joint transform correlator are presented. The optical correlators are very powerll systems used for image recognition, that perform a correlation between a bidimensional function which represents a Scene that must be analyzed and another bidimensional function that contains information about the reference function. This correlation is optically realized by a Fourier transform between the two functions. The optical Correlators have found a lot of applications for image recognition and target detection in various fields, such as the military field, robotics, medical field, industry a.s.o. Among the various applications of the optical correlators we can mention: digital fingerprints identification, credit card security, antique scripts recognition, determination of the cosmic ships and satellites behavior, amelioration of cancer tests precision, quality control etc.