Minimum noise and correlation energy optical correlation filter.

A new distortion-invariant optical correlation filter to produce easily detectable correlation peaks in the presence of noise and clutter and to provide better intraclass recognition is presented. The basic ideas of the minimum variance synthetic discriminant function correlation filter (which minimizes noise variance in the output correlation peak/plane) and the minimum average correlation energy filter (which minimizes the average correlation plane energy over all the training images) are unified in a new filter that produces sharp correlation peaks while maintaining an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio in the correlation plane output. This new minimum noise and correlation energy filter approach introduces the concept of using the spectral envelope of the training images and the noise power spectrum to obtain a tight bound to the energy minimization problem that is associated with distortion-invariant filters in noise while allowing the user a variable parameter to adjust depending on the noise or clutter that is expected. We present the mathematical basis for the minimum noise and correlation energy filter and the initial simulation results.