equivalent digital processor.5,6 When coupled with the ability to

manipulate and optimize the frequency plane filter, the optical

processor becomes a useful tool. With considerable justification,

there is great interest in the robotics community.

 Contribution

 This dissertation states that CGH matched filters should be used

in an optical correlator to recognize patterns in a complex scene, and

describes how to create that filter. The CGH matched filter is

superior to interferometric filters due to the ability to pre-process

the filter function and control the production of the hologram. The

use of optical elements for high speed pattern recognition was first

proposed 20 years ago.7 The concept of using computers to define and

generate holograms came only two years later.8 Since that time,

considerable effort has been devoted to exploring the potential of

these CGH elements for reconstruction holography. Most of this effort

was devoted to optimizing the methods for encoding and writing the

holograms.8-13 More recently, interest has grown in the area of

efficiency improvement.14 The efficiency of a hologram for optical

correlation must be high in order to utilize low power, light weight

diode lasers. In separate but parallel efforts in artificial

intelligence, researchers have studied the effects of image

enhancement on pattern recognition.15 Though research in the various

fields is proceeding, a unified approach to the interrelation of pre-

processing, holographic encoding and physical implementation is

lacking. Specifically, the research in CGH, to date, has only been

for display or reconstruction holography, not matched filtering. This