General-purpose optical pattern recognition image processors

A general-purpose programmable optical image processor architecture is described. A correlator architecture is used with different filter functions employed to implement a variety of different operations required in the different levels of computer vision. We consider input scenes with a number of objects present in clutter with a number of different object classes, distortions, and contrasts. The system locates all objects and identifies the class of each. The optical image processing operations performed include morphological low-level nonlinear functions, detection of candidate regions of interest, fusion of correlation outputs to reduce false alarms, image enhancement, and feature extraction. The optical correlation filters to realize each operations, examples of each, and real-time optical correlator hardware are described