Image preprocessing for rotation-invariant pattern recognition in the presence of signal-dependent noise.

I propose a new method that ensures efficient rotation-invariant pattern recognition in the presence of signal-dependent noise by combining the application of rotation-invariant correlation filters with preprocessing of the noisy input images. The preprocessing uses local suboptimal estimators derived from estimation theory and implies an a priori knowledge of a model describing the noise source. The image noise sources considered are speckle and film-grain noise.

Comparative effects of optical-correlator signal-dependent and signal-independent noise on pattern-recognition performance with the phase-only filter.

The comparative effects of optical-correlator signal-dependent and additive signal-independent noise on correlation-filter performance are analyzed by three different performance measures. For an identical value of the signal-to-noise ratio imposed on each type of noise in a binary input image, computer simulations performed with the phase-only filter show (i) that additive Gaussian signal-independent noise yields a much larger correlation-performance degradation than signal-dependent noise and (ii) that the different types of signal-dependent noise lead to similar correlation results because of similar effects on the input image that are inherent to the nature of the noise.