NOISE-IMMUNITY OF THRESHOLD DECOMPOSITION OPTOELECTRONIC ORDER-STATISTIC FILTERING

High-speed analog optoelectronic image processing systems are generall y characterized by low accuracy and are not well suited to application s requiring large dynamic range. We show that the low accuracy of a ty pical analog optoelectronic convolver can be tolerated in a high-accur acy application when threshold decomposition is used to perform order- statistic processing on digitized gray-scale imagery. The robustness o f the method in the presence of system noise, combined with the parall elism of the optical convolver, suggests that hybrid analog optical/di gital electronic processors for order-statistic image processing may b e attractive alternatives to all-electronic processors. We analyze the immunity of such a hybrid processor to noise generated by spatial var iations of emitter and photodetector arrays for the order-statistic op erations of median filtering, dilation, and erosion.