stan (11/29/82)
In addition to the article in Scientific American, there are good articles in the recent IEEE Spectrum and Proceedings of the IEEE. I think they were both written by the same group, so that the Proc. article fills out the details of the Spectrum article. Although they would like to digitally process images in real time, there are optical "tricks" that have been used to process such images for the past 20 years or so.