Primitive Optical Computing Model with Films: Boolean Conjunction of the Square Matrix-Arrayed Color Codes

Abstract

Color is one of the most useful and attractive characteristics of light applicable to optical science and the related industries. In recent decades, a number of studies focusing on the use of light as a key component of computation have attracted considerable attention from researchers and engineers because these studies are potentially applicable to signal processing through optical interconnections between electronic devices. Such studies include the optical parallel logic gates proposed by a Japanese research group, allowing spontaneous and parallel computing with spatial coding using lights, simply by overlaying a pair of shadowgram images. For computational handling of the colors visible to human eyes,Commission Internationale de l’Eclairgehas defined CIE 1976 color space (CIELAB). The author has been engaged in the development of CIELAB-based printable and computable color codes possibly used for novel optical logic gate system as one of natural computing approaches. In the present study, by employing the pairs of CIELAB-coded-printed transparent films overlaid, a Boolean operation for the crossing (conjugation) of 2-by-2 color matrices based on the scanning of CIELAB values was demonstrated. This approach is still primitive but might be a significant step for manifesting the array-based processing of colors representing print-preserved and digitalized information.