Optoelectronic stochastic processor arrays: demonstration of video rate simulated annealing noise cleaning operation

Progress of optical information processing is driven by two sources : optoelectronic technology benefits from the development of compound semiconductor circuit technology, and the continued growth of electronic chip speed and density increases the need for new interconnect technologies. We advocate the use of these advances for solving complex law level image processing problems using dedicated optoelectronic processor arrays. These massively parallel, special purpose machines would not be conceivable without a suitable combination of optics with high density hybrid (digital and analog, electronic and optical) smart pixels. One optical operation of particular interest here is the generation of random number arrays for the implementation of stochastic algorithms. We describe the general structure of optoelectronic "smart retinae" that combine laser speckle, optical convolution and VLSI circuits to implement parallel simulated annealing. We report on our present results that have demonstrated one simple case of such an operation performing parallel simulated annealing at video rate.