[comp.ai.digest] holographic memory and pattern recognition

ray@basser.cs.su.OZ.AU (04/15/88)

>From John Haugeland, "The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism",
Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1978), pp 215-260 ...

  >  ... if a hologram of an arbitrary scene is suitably illuminated with
  >  the light from a reference object, bright spots will appear
  >  indicating (virtually instantaneously) the presence and location of
  >  any occurrences of the reference object in the scene (and dimmer
  >  spots indicate "similar" objects).  So some neurophysiological
  >  holographic encoding might account for a number of perplexing
  >  features of visual recall and recognition ...

This stuff is part of AI folklore.  There are many papers that discuss
the philosophical implications for AI of this phenomenon (as does
Haugeland's paper), or propose neural implementations of this sort of
process. But what I want is a paper by somebody who has ACTUALLY PERFORMED
THIS EXPERIMENT.  Can anyone point me to such a paper?

Raymond Lister
Basser Department of Computer Science
University of Sydney
NSW  2006
AUSTRALIA

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  [Fourier-based template matching is trivial to set up on an
  optical workbench, and is not considered experimental AI.  In
  character recognition, for instance, one can project a text letter
  through a font mask and choose the mask position corresponding to
  the greatest response in the Fourier plane.  (Holograms can be
  used, but are not required when you have the optics generating
  real-time Fourier planes.  Computer vision research usually
  substitutes digital FFT transforms for the optics.  Fielded
  target-recognition systems are likely to use holograms or acoustic-
  wave devices because they are faster than digital techniques and
  more robust than complex lens systems.)  Such template matching
  works great if the text characters are complete, isolated, and
  not distorted.  Holographic systems storing dozens of different
  views of tanks and aircraft have been demonstrated.  -- KIL]