Wavelet-modified binary phase-only morphological correlation for color pattern recognition

This paper reports a morphological phase-only correlation technique based on bit-map representation for recognition of color as well as grey images in a hybrid digital-optical correlation architecture. The color image is decomposed into its R, G and B components, and each component is further decomposed into eight disjoint elementary images depending upon the bit-map representation of the color value at each pixel. Bit-map representation of the pixel values of an image reduces the required computational time. A set of twenty-four disjoint wavelet-modified binary phase-only filters (WBPOFs) are generated from these bit-map decomposed images. The target image is similarly decomposed into eight disjoint images each of R, G and B and their digital Fourier transforms multiplied with the corresponding WBPOFs. The product functions thus obtained are added up to form a single resultant product function, whose optical Fourier transformation gives the correlation peaks for the presence of R, G and B components in the image. The single product function overcomes the necessity of obtaining the final optical Fourier transformation of the R, G and B components separately. The novelty of this approach lies in the fact that the WBPOFs synthesized by this procedure are thus able to identify both colored as well as gray images and can tolerate salt-and-pepper noise to a considerable extent. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.