Functional properties of dual-rail photonic image processor using comparator arrays

We extend the description of a discrete-time cellular neural network, depic ting the behaviour of both cellular and morphological processors, to any ty pe of dual-rail processors. We show that a system with two arrays of differ ential pairs of transceivers can be treated as a two-layer cellular network and that it can perform morphological and rank order filter operations. As an illustration we built and tested a dual-rail processor composed of arra ys of GaAs optical thyristor differential pairs and highlight experimental results on median filtering.