ABSTRACF Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy laboratory, is responsible for maintaining the safety, security, reliability, and availability of the nuclear weapons stockpile for the United States. Because of the changing national and global political climates and inevitable budget cuts, Sandia is changing the methods and processes it has traditionally used in the product realization cycle for weapon components. Because of the increasing age of the nuclear stockpile, it is certain that the reliability of these weapons will degrade with time unless eventual action is taken to repair, requalify, or renew them. Furthermore, due to the downsizing of the DOE weapons production sites and loss of technical personnel, the new product realization process is being focused on developing and deploying advanced automation technologies in order to maintain the capability for producing new components.

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A demonstration of a real-time image correlator based upon acousto-optic and charge-coupled devices will be presented. This architecture performs the two-dimensional correlation utilizing one-dimensional input devices. Each input image line is read into the system one line at a time using an acousto-optic device (AOD). The reference templates are stored in an electronic memory and introduced into the optical system in row parallel using a one-dimensional laser diode array. As the information propagates down the length of the AOD it is correlated against all of the rows of the reference template; the result accumulates on a 2-D charge-coupled device (CCD). The correlation in the vertical direction is accomplished by operating the CCD in a shift-and-add mode. The demonstration involves tracking a moving grayscale object using a video cassette recorder as the input image source. The ability to rapidly correlate with multiple templates will also be demonstrated. The optics are mounted inside a 12 in. × 15 in. × 6 in. enclosure. The memory and control electronics are housed in a single VME card cage.