OPTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MORPHOLOGICAL HIT-MISS TRANSFORM USING EXTENSIVE COMPLEMENTARY ENCODING

The morphological hit-miss transform (HMT) has been proved an useful m ethod for pattern recognition. Because of the inherent parallelism of the morphological transformations including the HMT, the optical imple mentation of which has attracted much attention. In this paper, we pre sent an extensive complementary encoding method, by which the foregrou nd and background information of an image are incorporated into a whol e, and the hit-miss transform can be optically implemented by using on e optical correlator in one step. Using a simple incoherent optical co rrelator to perform the correlation, the extensive complementary encod ing HMT is demonstrated and experimental results are given. (C) 1998 P ublished by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.