Automatic angle measurement of a 2D object using optical correlator-neural networks hybrid system

Abstract

In this paper a novel method is proposed and demonstrated for automatic rotation angle measurement of a 2D object using a hybrid architecture, consisting of a 4f optical correlator with a binary phase only multiplexed matched filter and a single layer neural network. The hybrid set-up can be considered as a two-layer perceptron-like neural network; an optical correlator is the first layer and the standard single layer neural network is the second layer. The training scheme used to train the hybrid architecture is a combination of a Direct Binary Search algorithm, to train the optical correlator, and an Error Back Propagation algorithm, to train the neural network. The aim is to perform the major information processing by the optical correlator with a small additional processing by the neural network stage. This allows the system to be used for real-time applications as optics has the inherent ability to process information in a parallel manner at high speed. The neural network stage gives an extra dimension of freedom so that complicated tasks like automatic rotation angle measurement can be achieved. Results of both computer simulation and experimental set-up are presented for rotation angle measurement of an English alphabetic character as a 2D object. The experimental set-up consists of a real optical correlator using two spatial light modulators for both input and frequency plane representations and a PC based model of a single layer network.