1. A system for feature extraction of surface manifolds, said system comprising: an optical remote sensor that measures a distance to and/or other properties of a target by illuminating said target with light, wherein said optical remote sensor provides sensor data indicative of at least one surface manifold and wherein point data is generated with respect to said at least one surface manifold; and an AHAH (Anti-Hebbian and Hebbian) based mechanism that performs an AHAH-based feature extraction operation on said point data for compression and processing thereof.