Optical Processing Techniques For Advanced Intelligent Robots And Computer Vision

Coherent optical processors capable of producing various feature spaces in parallel exist. Those feature spaces that can be optically generated include fourier coefficients, space variant Mellin transforms and polar transform coefficients, moments, chord distribu-tions and Hough/Radon transforms. Optical correlators capable of simultaneous identification and location of multiple objects are well-known and have reached significant levels of compact fabrication. New methods of matched spatial filter synthesis allow these correlators to achieve multi-class distortion-invariant object recognition. New optical computer architectures performing matrix-vector and linear algebra operations represent a class of general purpose systems similiar to digital systolic and multiple processor systems. These various optical architectures will be reviewed and reference will be made to initial results obtained on these systems. In all instances, all architectures are hybrid optical/digital systems that utilize the best features of optical and digital processors. In all cases, attention is given to multi-class distortion-invariant pattern recognition.