Coherent-optical fourier transform of multidimensional signals represented as sequences

A three-dimensional (3-D) or 4-D signal can be represented as a sequence, i.e. a 2-D set of sectional images. Fourier transform of a whole sequence requires high space-bandwidth transformation capacity and therefore is a appropriate task for coherent optics. The resulting 2-D sequence spectrum is also a sequence representation of the original 3-D or 4-D spectrum. Coordinates and scale of this representation are derived. Several experimental results illustrate this representation and demonstrate the possibilities for multidimensional Fourier analysis.