Composite matched filtering with error correction

Information theory shows that one can communicate with arbitrarily low error probability over a noisy channel. By recognizing that some types of computations can be cast as communications problems, it may be possible to compute accurately with an inexact processor. Traditional analog optical processors, for example, offer advantages of parallelism and speed but suffer from significant inaccuracies. We propose an algorithm whereby the accuracy of matched filter processors can be improved significantly at the cost of a modest increase in computational resources. Errors that are due to noisy data and/or inexact computing can be detected and in some cases corrected.