<title>Automatic target recognition field demonstration using a grayscale optical correlator</title>

Abstract

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has recently developed a camcorder-sized grayscale optical correlator (GOC) for real- time automatic target recognition applications. Key features of this GOC include: a grayscale input SLM to accommodate direct interface with the input imaging sensor, a real-valued (bipolar-amplitude) filter spatial light modulator to enable use of a MACH (Maximum Average Correlation Height) composite correlation filter algorithm, compact and portable. This GOC architecture has greatly improved the system complexity by removing the need of preprocess (binarization) the input, and the powerful MACH composite filter has greatly reduced the number of filter templates. Updating of the GOC system will be described in this paper, a recent real-time field demonstration for target recognition and tracking at Mojave Desert, CA will also be reported.