A spatial light modulator is essentially an optical device that can process images in order to perform various tasks like facial recognition and target identification. Current technology utilizes liquid crystal display technology (LCD) that is effective but extremely slow—processing roughly 60 to 100 images per second. This is a function of how quickly the liquid crystal can change from clear to opaque.
This type of response may be adequate for various operations like license plate recognition and other low-end identification needs, but creating more sophisticated applications like facial recognition and target identification will require processing at rates thousands of times faster. By way of example, Google has been testing autonomous cars—these are cars that can be programmed to drive to specific locations. These vehicles have been running enabled with LCD spatial light modulators hundreds of thousands of miles. They are however, limited in that they cannot respond quickly to an unexpected threat, like a child running into the street to retrieve a ball.
Lightwave Logic has initiated a proprietary development program with an outside contractor that is utilizing one of the company’s advanced polymer materials. Taking advantage of the extremely fast processing speeds of organic polymers, the resulting device could theoretically process a million images in a second. Lightwave believes that this would be a game-changing event that could turn this technology from an interesting science project into something that could revolutionize a wide range of applications from autonomous cars, to smart weapons or video surveillance cameras that could identify the face of a terrorist/target in less than a second.
