Abstract

Owing to advances in photon detection, there is a developing interest in identifying objects from a limited number of photons. Such applications include astronomy, night vision, long-range target recognition and medical and industrial radiology. In each of these applications it is desirable to extract the maximum amount of information from a limited number of photons. In this paper, we propose a method for object recognition based on the formation of irradiance level histograms for a group of known objects. The technique is used to construct a binary histogram which requires fewer photons than a correlation filter to identify a particular object.

© 1986 Optical Society of America