Optical quasi-three-dimensional correlation

A novel optical correlator for three-dimensional (3-D) object recognition is proposed herein. Several projections of a 3-D scene are recorded under white light illumination and fused into a single complex two-dimensional function. After properly filtering this function, it is then coded into a computer-generated hologram (CGH). When the CGH is coherently illuminated, a correlation space between the 3-D tested scene and the reference function is reconstructed, in which light peaks indicate on the existences and locations of true targets in the observed 3-D scene. Experimental results are presented.