Optical Implementation Of A Novel Accurate-Location Radar And Sonar

An optical implementation is considered for a novel system, recently invented by the author, for accurately locating objects relatively close to an array from distributed backscatter. Processing is partitioned into handling scatterers in annuli rather than in pie shaped regions as in conventional systems which use beamforming followed by matched filtering. The advantages of the new design are discussed. Precomputing a matrix containing geometric and transmission pulse information leaves only a matrix-vector computation to be performed in real-time. Experimental results are shown for a 100 by 100 matrix-vector multiplication with a new device, a spatial light rebroadcaster (SLR). A method of constructing an optical sonar or radar is proposed using the new concept and the optical matrix-vector multiplier.