Abstract

Liquid crystal TV has attracted much attention in the optical image processing community mainly because of its high versatility at very low cost. Here we report the optical property of an active matrix LCTV (Seiko LVD 202 LCTV) and demonstrate one of its uses as a binary phase-only SLM. A series of measurements have been carried out to investigate the device's contrast ratio, modulation transfer function, polarization effect, phase uniformity, etc. As foreseen, the performance of this device is superior to the older generation LCTVs reported before.¹ Since it has a large polarization angle between the ON and OFF state, this LCTV is suitable to operate as a binary phase-only SLM. To achieve binary phase-only modulation, the second analyzer is oriented perpendicular to the bisector of the two transmitted polarization states.¹ In reference to the binary phase-only joint transform correlator proposed,² we implement this correlator with a LCTV operated in the phase modulation mode. The merits of the phase-only correlator must be the increase of diffraction efficiency, decrease in dc light energy, and others as mentioned in Refs. 2 and 3.

© 1989 Optical Society of America