Optical rotation invariant corner detector

In this work we introduce a new approach for corner extraction with rotation invariance. The method is based on an optical processor where the filter in the frequency plane is composed by a spiral phase function and a binary amplitude. The output image of the optical setup presents intensity peaks in each square corner location. The performance of the proposed method was tested on synthetic scenes by numerical simulations and by optical measurements. The presented results show that the method allows the corner extraction, even with rotated scenes. (C) 2008 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.