Experimental demonstration of the hybrid opto-electronic correlator for target recognition.

Optical target recognition using correlators is an important technique for fast verification and identification of images. The hybrid opto-electronic correlator (HOC) recently proposed by us bypasses the need for nonlinear materials such as photorefractive polymer films by using detectors instead, and the phase information is yet conserved by the interference of plane waves with the images. In this paper, we demonstrate experimentally the basic working principle of the HOC architecture using currently available technologies.

Incorporation of polar Mellin transform in a hybrid optoelectronic correlator for scale and rotation invariant target recognition.

In this paper, we show that our proposed hybrid optoelectronic correlator (HOC), which correlates images using spatial light modulators (SLMs), detectors, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), is capable of detecting objects in a scale and rotation invariant manner, along with the shift invariance feature, by incorporating polar Mellin transform (PMT). For realistic images, we cut out a small circle at the center of the Fourier transform domain, as required for PMT, and illustrate how this process corresponds to correlating images with real and imaginary parts. Furthermore, we show how to carry out shift, rotation, and scale invariant detection of multiple matching objects simultaneously, a process previously thought to be incompatible with PMT-based correlators.

Hybrid optoelectronic correlator architecture for shift-invariant target recognition.

In this paper, we present theoretical details and the underlying architecture of a hybrid optoelectronic correlator (HOC) that correlates images using spatial light modulators (SLMs), detector arrays, and field programmable gate array (FPGA). The proposed architecture bypasses the need for nonlinear materials such as photorefractive polymer films by using detectors instead, and the phase information is yet conserved by the interference of plane waves with the images. However, the output of such an HOC has four terms: two convolution signals and two cross-correlation signals.