Photonic morphological image processing

Abstract

We have demonstrated a morphological image processor composed of arrays of bistable optoelectronic transceivers which are connected in differential pairs and work as comparators. The use of differential pairs of optoelectronic thyristors suggested a dual rail architecture for this Photonic Morphological Image Processor (PMIP). The PMIP consists of a thresholding module, that decomposes grey level images into binary slices, and a binary morphological processing module. Morphological operations are performed within a neighbourhood defined by a structuring element implemented as a diffractive fan-out element. We demonstrate dilation and erosion operations performed at a 100 Hz frame rate for an image of 8x8 pixels and threshold decomposition of 6 grey level images is demonstrated at a 1,800 Hz rate. In this paper we also discuss the limitations of photonic morphological image processing with respect to speed, bandwidth, parallelism and architecture.