Chau-Jern CHENG¹ and Han-Yen TU²

¹Department of Electro-Optical Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan, R.O.C.
²Department of Electronic Engineering, St. John's & St. Mary's Institute of Technology, Taipei 25135, Taiwan, R.O.C.

(Received November 13, 2001; Accepted June 20, 2002)

The implementation of a nonzero-order joint transform correlator using the double port Mach–Zehnder interferometric technique is proposed and demonstrated. This approach provides on-line processing for directly removing the zero-order components of a joint power spectrum in one step and performs the nonzero-order optical correlation. Experimental results are presented and discussed.

Key words: joint transform correlator, optical pattern recognition, Mach–Zehnder interferometer