This paper introduces a modeling of the human rotation invariant recognition mechanism at the neural level. In the model, mechanisms of memory search and mental rotation are realized in the process of minimizing the energy of a bi-directional connection network. The thrust of the paper is to explain temporal mental activities such as successive memory retrievals and continuous mental rotation in terms of state transitions of collective neurons based on nonequilibrium dynamics. We conclude that regularities emerging in the dynamics of intermittent chaos lead the recognition process in a structural and meaningful way.

As a new category of the optical application system integrated with electronics, the opto-electronic information system (OEIS) is presented. Combination of the different characteristic technologies, optics and electronics, is expected to be useful for development of an effective and high-performance information systems. The properties of the optical technologies such as parallelism, high-speed, and large information capacity can be utilized for information processing. Even if some of the functions are emulated by the electronics, the optics give more effective solutions. To implement the OEIS, various optoelectronic devices and fabrication technologies are available including vertical cavity surface emitting lasers and spatial light modulators. There are two forms of system construction for the OEIS: an application of optics to an electronic-based system and the reversed form. As examples of the OEIS, the parallel matching architecture (PMA) and the thin observation module by bound optics (TOMBO) are presented. The PMA is an architecture of parallel computing system specified for global processing. This architecture shows a typical strategy to utilize the optical interconnection capability with flexibility of the electronic technology. The TOMBO presents possibility of morphological conversion using combination of the optical and electronic technologies. A compound-eye imaging system and post digital processing enable us to realize a very thin image capturing system. The issues related on development of the OEIS are proper usage of optics, effective fusion of the optical and electronic technologies, methodologies for system construction, fabrication supporting tools, and development of attractive demonstrators other than communication and interconnection fields.

In this paper, we report on design and fabrication of the pipelined digital correlator (PDC) for the opto-electronic discrete correlation processor (OEDCP). The OEDCP consists of optical fan-in and fan-out interconnection systems and several number of PDC's with optical I/O ports. The OEDCP achieves high processing performance with sophisticated combination of optics and electronics. We design and fabricate a prototype of the PDC which is the processing engine of the OEDCP. For the prototype, the pixel number of the input and the output images is 88 and that of the kernel is 33. The designed chip is composed of approximately 10,000 transistors. Operation of the fabricated chip was verified using test vectors.

We propose an optical computing architecture called pure optical parall array logic system (P-OPALS) as an instance of sophisticated optical computing system. On the P-OPALS, high density images can be processed in parallel using the optical system with high resolving power. We point out problems on the way to develop the P-OPALS and propose logical foundation of the P-OPALS called single-input optical array logic (S-OAL) as a solution of those problems. Based on the proposed architecture, an experimental system of the P-OPALS is constructed by using three optical techniques: birefringent encoding, selectable discrete correlator, and birefringent decoding. To show processing capability of the P-OPALS, some basic parallel operations are demonstrated. The results obtained indicate that image consisting of 300 100 pixels can be processed in parallel on the experimental P-OPALS. Finally, we estimate potential capability of the P-OPALS.