Abstract

Using state-of-the-art optical technologies, such as holographic three-dimensional interconnect and optical disk storage, a novel optoelectronic programmable data-base ma chine for storing, processing, and reconstructing three-dimensional solid objects is proposed. The so-called edge-based boundary model that represents a three-dimensional object by its faces and edge sequence is used as the data structure. For efficient optical storage and processing, this data structure is further decomposed into three levels: a face, an edge, and a vertex level. Each decomposed level is encoded into a set of matrices that are suitable for optical matrix processing. Various Boolean set operations, such as select, join, intersect, and project, are used.

© 1990 Optical Society of America