Abstract

Experimental results for a real-time polychromatic pattern recognition system are presented. In this technique, image recognition is performed based on both the spectral content and the shape of the target which can be a diffusely illuminated real object. The correlator employs a color encoding grating and a spatial light modulator to convert the incoherently illuminated color object into spatially sampled coherent images to be processed by a multispectral band matched spatial filter. The advantage of this system over the prior matched filtering technique is its ability to use both color and shape in recognizing real objects. Experimental results obtained by this real-time correlator indicate that the system has a high degree of color-spatial selectivity.

© 1985 Optical Society of America