Abstract

We consider the application of optical computational operations to problems that arise in various geometric applications, such as computer graphics, image processing, pattern matching. etc. We show how to implement, using only a constant number of basic optical operations, a variety of algorithms that solve fairly complex tasks of this sort. We discuss the methodology that we propose, list the geometric algorithms that we have developed to date, and illustrate the approach in two more detailed applications, motivated by computer graphics and pattern matching: drawing all possible lines connecting pairs in a given set of points, and computing the closest pair (or k closest pairs) of points in a given set.

© 1993 Optical Society of America