Independent task Fourier filters

Since the early 1960s, a major part of optical computing systems has been Fourier pattern recognition, which takes advantage of high speed filter changes to enable powerful nonlinear discrimination in "real time.'' Because filter has a task quite independent of the tasks of the other filters, they can be applied and evaluated in parallel or, in a simple approach I describe, in sequence very rapidly. Thus I use the name ITFF (independent task Fourier filter). These filters can also break very complex discrimination tasks into easily handled parts, so the wonderful space invariance properties of Fourier filtering need not be sacrificed to achieve high discrimination and good generalizability even for ultracomplex discrimination problems. The training procedure proceeds sequentially, as the task for a given filter is defined a posteriori by declaring it to be the discrimination of particular members of set A from all members of set B with sufficient margin. That is, we set the threshold to achieve the desired margin and note the A members discriminated by that threshold. Discriminating those A members from all members of B becomes the task of that filter. Those A members are then removed from the set A, so no other filter will be asked to perform that already accomplished task.