Abstract

Recently, page-oriented volume holograms have received attention as an alternative to optical disks for optical binary data storage. Since volume holograms allow pagewise parallel access, error detection and correction will be fundamentally different from that employed by bit-serial disks. Due to the nature of frequency representation, the Fourier transform (FT) has a certain degree of error tolerance built-in. Although the FT is not an error correcting code in the strict sense due to a lack of redundancy, since local frequency perturbations will be realized as a global degradation in the SNR of the input data, the FT coupled with a threshold function exhibits some level of immunity to errors for binary data. It is this property which is investigated in this paper for increasing the reliability of stored binary data.

© 1989 Optical Society of America