Use of Colored Reflectors for Negation or Highlighting of Scanned Color Information on Film-Based CIELAB-Coded Optical Logic Gate Models

Abstract

In the last two decades, a number of researchers have been engaged in the study of natural computing systems that employ physical, chemical, and biological properties as direct media for manifesting computations. Among such attempts, studies focusing on the use of lights as key computation components in particular have attracted the attention of researchers and engineers, since these studies are potentially applicable to signal processing through optical interconnections between electronic devices. Our research team has recently been engaged in the study of a novel color-based natural computing model. Our recent works included using CIELAB-coded colors on printed-paper to compute Boolean conjunctions (AND operations). In this study, we performed Boolean operations based on CIELAB-coded colors by placing color-printed films over aluminum-coated reflectors with and/or without color. The results of the operations were gathered by testing the color codes printed on the films for negation or highlighting. This type of CIELAB-based color computing has a wide range of potential applications, such as a method for security or access control to secured systems. Such applications could match paired color keys on which the arrays of color codes could be printed and optically computed.