A fine-grained channel access system and method to facilitate fine-grained channel access in a high-data rate wide-band wireless local-area network. There are no moving parts and the invention is readily constructed as an imaging system that obtains polarization values at all point in a scene simultaneously. A compensation optical section performs compensation so as to cancel out the measured aberrations. A fast clique-based pattern-matching algorithm generates alignments of pairs of adjacent molecular fragments on the query molecule that are subsequently reassembled to complete database molecules.