Repeated filtering in consecutive fractional Fourier domains

In the first part of this thesis, relationships between the fractional Fourier transformation and Fourier optical systems are analyzed to further elucidate the importance of this transformation in optics. Then in the second part, the concept of repeated filtering is considered. In this part, the repeated filtering method is interpreted in two different ways. In the first interpretation the linear transformation between input and output is constrained to be of the form of repeated filtering in consecutive domains. The applications of this constrained linear transformation to signal synthesis (beam shaping) and signal restoration are discussed. In the second interpretation, general linear systems are synthesized with repeated filtering in consecutive domains, and the synthesis of some important linear systems in signal processing and the .synthesis of optical interconnection architectures are considered for illustrative purposes. In all of the examples, when our repeated filtering method is compared with single domain filtering methods, significant improvements in performance are obtained with only modest increases in optical or digital implementation costs. Similarly, when the proposed method is compared with general linear systems, it is seen that acceptable performance may be possible with significant computational savings in implementation costs.