What an optical system does in parallel, and what that costs. Each example builds the processor from elements the engine already has
(lens, gap, a mask read from a file, a cartesian grid, the beamProfile instrument) and checks the output against the same
operation in numpy.
| example | what | reference |
|---|---|---|
| 4f-correlator | find a pattern in a scene in one pass: a matched filter in the Fourier plane | correlation theorem; peak positions and heights against numpy |
| optical-convolution | the same layout as a convolution engine: blur, edge detection, motion blur | convolution theorem |
| matrix-vector | y = A x by light: a lens is the DFT matrix, a 4f system a circulant matrix | A @ x |
| parallelism-and-time | engine wall time, digital FFT time and the time light needs, for N from 64 to 1024 | the scaling of each |
The one rule they share. On a grid of N x N points with pitch dx, a thin lens followed by a gap of its focal length is the discrete
Fourier transform when the Fourier-plane pixels are the DFT bins. That fixes the focal length: f = N dx² / λ (critical sampling).
Then lens + gap(f) is exactly np.fft.fft2, and a 4f system with a filter H in the middle is flip(ifft2(fft2(object) * H)): the
object convolved with the impulse response of H, inverted through the origin. _optics.py holds this layout and its numpy twin.
What these examples do not claim. The engine simulates the light on a digital machine. Its wall time is the cost of that
simulation, not the time light needs. The "optical time" in parallelism-and-time is a model (path length over c, plus an assumed
sensor exposure), and a real processor also pays for loading the scene and the filter and for reading the result. The comparison is
about how the cost scales with N.
A general matrix-vector multiplier (Goodman's layout) needs cylindrical lenses; the engine's lens is round, so only the
shift-invariant matrices are shown.
Run everything: python docs/examples/make_all.py --group Computing (about 15 s). Each example commits one hero figure (hero.png)
and one animation (animation.gif) next to its README.