Abstract

Binary nonlinear joint transform correlators have been shown to produce remarkable results in correlation-based signal detection.¹ The binarization is simply reducing the joint power spectrum information at the Fourier plane to a + 1 or a – 1 (1 bit/ pixel) according to a predetermined threshold value. An important question that arises is the effect of the quantization of the joint power spectrum before binarization of the power spectrum. Since digitization of the joint power spectrum means limiting the joint power spectrum to a fixed amount of levels, it is necessary to determine the minimum number of quantization levels. We show that the minimum number of quantization levels for digitizing the joint power spetrum has a significant effect on the performance of the binary nonlinear joint transform correlator. If the joint power spectrum is quantized with an insufficient number of levels, the binarization of the joint power spectrum will result in extremely poor correlation performance.

© 1989 Optical Society of America