Iconics at the turn of the century. Status and prospects

This paper provides a short summary of thirty years of development of a new scientific specialization in optics-iconics-and discusses the main results of recent iconic research. The special role of the methodological apparatus developed at the State Optical Institute, orienting iconic research to the study of the general properties of images, is pointed out from the viewpoint of the circulation of information and the specifics of visual perception. Attention is directed to possible promising avenues in iconic research, based on the optical principles of information processing, the use of robust methods, wavelet analysis, the methods of artificial neural networks, and pattern recognition. (C) 1999 The Optical Society of America. [S1070-9762(99)00206-7].