Pulse compression, fiber communications, and diffraction: a unified approach

A unified approach is developed to three important areas of signal and image processing: pulse compression and real-time spectrum analysis, fiber-cable communications and dispersion, and Fresnel diffraction and optical filtering. The results are based on the properties of quadratic phase filters and Fresnel transforms, and they lead to a variety of analogies among the time responses of fiber cables, the spatial variations of diffracted fields, and the role of frequency modulation in narrow-band systems. The analysis includes deterministic and stochastic excitations.